内容摘要：The morning sunlight falls on Daniel Iyatunguk, a 21-year-old seal hunter, as he pauses for a photo by the lagoon in Shishmaref, Alaska, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The morning sunlight falls on Daniel Iyatunguk, a 21-year-old seal hunter, as he pauses for a photo by the lagoon in Shishmaref, Alaska, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

WHO ARE CLIMATE MIGRANTS?Most climate migrants move within the borders of their homelands, usually from rural areas to cities after losing their home or livelihood because of drought, rising seas or another weather calamity. Because cities also are facing their own climate-related problems, including soaring temperatures and water scarcity, people are increasingly being forced to flee across international borders to seek refuge.

Yet climate migrants are not afforded refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which provides legal protection only to people fleeing persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or particular social group.DEFINING CLIMATE MIGRATIONWhile worsening weather conditions are exacerbating poverty, crime and political instability, and fueling tensions over dwindling resources from Africa to Latin America, often climate change is overlooked as a contributing factor to people fleeing their homelands. According to the UNHCR, 90% of refugees under its mandate are from countries “on the front lines of the climate emergency.”

In El Salvador, for example, scores each year leave villages because of crop failure from drought or flooding, and end up in cities where they become victims of gang violence and ultimately flee their countries because of those attacks.“It’s hard to say that someone moves just because of climate change. Is everyone who leaves Honduras after a hurricane a climate migrant?” Elizabeth Ferris, a research professor at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “And then there are non-climate related environmental hazards - people flee earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis - should they be treated differently than those displaced by weather-related phenomena?”

Despite the challenges, it’s vital that governments identify climate-displaced people, Ferris added.

“The whole definitional issue isn’t a trivial question - how can you develop a policy for people if you aren’t clear on who it applies to?” she wrote.On the edge of the rapidly growing camp for displaced people, an official was drawing lines in the dust. He was marking squares, a hopscotch of future homes for the waiting families. What they would build on the spaces little bigger than a king-sized bed, and where they would find the materials, would be their problem.

For Issack, Hassan and the rest, the huts would be better than sleeping under the stars, with thorn bushes giving no protection from the mosquitoes and grit flung by the wind. Families hurried in the last hour before sunset to occupy their squares, digging with twigs to make holes for poles of stripped branches.Twenty-four hours later, their section of the camp looked like any other, with plastic sheeting and fabric, even strips of mosquito nets and clothing, stretched around the branches.

Issack lived in one hut built by his wife, Hassan in another built by his sister.Mohamed Kheir Issack, 80, right, and Issack Farow Hassan, 75, sit in Issack’s shelter at a camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Dollow, Somalia on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)