WORLD VIEW/Paul Gillespie:'THERE WILL be millions of 'environmental' migrants by 2020, with climate change as one of the major drivers of this phenomenon," according to the report on security and climate change submitted to the European Council in Brussels yesterday.
"Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure."
The report, by Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, captured the headlines and underlines the need to strengthen EU and international institutions capable of handling the issue.
It lists a series of phenomena that could destabilise poor nations, including rising sea levels; a reduction in arable land; droughts; flooding, water shortages and diminishing food and fish stocks. In the language of security analysis, climate change is a "threat multiplier", intensifying existing tensions and instabilities.
Linking security to climate change shifts the latter issue from environment ministers to prime ministers, presidents, finance and defence ministers, who have more power to deal with it. This is, therefore, a step change that will have rolling effects throughout the EU systems of multilevel governance. It poses alternatives between further securitising migration by erecting fortresses against it or preparing more constructively by improving development aid programmes for afflicted states and easing access to the European labour market that badly needs immigrant workers because of demographic change.
A number of these questions were discussed on a recent visit to Vienna with a British management training group drawn from senior civil servants, NGO and business people.
Speakers on the programme, dealing with migration issues in an expanding Europe, outlined how complex they are. Human trafficking overlaps with drugs and criminal networks at one end of the spectrum, moving through asylum and refugee systems to labour migration from outside the EU and within it.
Human trafficking of women for prostitution, children for child labour and begging and forced workers for construction, agriculture and sweatshops runs at nearly one million people a year worldwide, according to Eva Biaudet, Finnish special representative of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) secretariat on the subject. About 120,000 people are so trafficked into the EU each year.
She emphasises three relevant countervailing principles in co-operation with governments that have the primary responsibility: prevention, by identifying gaps in the system, sectors prone to exploitation and especially vulnerable groups; protection by identifying who needs assistance, and prosecution of the transnational networks involved.
In keeping with a human rights approach, she wants to see as much emphasis on empowering the victims as in repressing the trade. But as the group learned, trafficking is often invisible, contained within families and involving continuous networks of supply and demand. New border systems reinforce these patterns - in Moldova perhaps one family in three is now involved since the Schengen system was put in place.
Biaudet welcomed Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's recent visit to the OSCE headquarters in Vienna as a sign of Ireland's commitment to the organisation, whose human dimension pillar Ireland is currently chairing. Mr Ahern regretted that the last summit meeting of the 56 OSCE states was in 1999.
Former EU commissioner for agriculture Franz Fischler, now a consultant, argued that the ambitious EU targets of cutting carbon emissions can best be achieved by energy efficiency, changing crop use in agriculture and greater incentives for risk capital in environmental economics. He is sceptical about the EU target for 10 per cent use of biofuels.
Suddenly, business accepts the argument and demands a clear policy framework to make change profitable, he said. Throughout the world, the greatest losers will be those who leave the land, so rural development programmes are essential; but this year for the first time, the majority of humanity lives in towns and cities - from which much of the climate-induced migration and radicalisation will come.
Migration within the EU has had the greatest impact on Britain and Ireland over the last four years, following the accession of eight central and eastern European states in 2004.
They were among the few to accept free labour movement and now watch anxiously to see whether the flow of workers diminishes in the current economic downturn. Former Polish finance minister Lezkek Balcerowwicz is convinced that as their economies converge in coming decades, migration from Poland and other EU states will diminish, as in Italy, Greece and Spain in the previous generation.
Austrians are fearful about such immigration, but depend hugely on informal Slovak networks for domestic help, working below the minimum wage. The British group heard from policymakers and migrants in Bratislava and Budapest about how emigration affects skills and wages there and benefits the host society, as migrants rely less on social welfare systems and boost taxation revenues, in addition to meeting labour shortages.
There was no tabloid xenophobia or Euroscepticism in evidence, but rather a willingness to accept that migration will happen and that its dark and brighter sides should be managed effectively at European level.