CiR2P Option 31 | Establish safe havens

DISCUSSION:

Establish a safe haven can be an effective tool to protect vulnerable populations from climate-related harm. A safe haven (a term that can be used interchangeably with “safe area” and “safe zone”) is a specific and limited form of security guarantee that can be established in the middle of a situation that is causing severe harm to a population at large.

The advantage of establishing a safe haven is that it allows for a third party to intervene in a country where a full peacekeeping mission is politically impossible and nevertheless achieve civilian protection. Ideally, a safe haven is agreed upon by all parties to a conflict.

A safe haven is only as useful as the mandate and capability of the intervening force to defend it, with deadly force if necessary, for the duration of the safe haven’s existence. The presence of a safe corridor to the safe haven that guarantees humanitarian access increases the chances of successfully protecting civilians.

Save havens of sorts, which have occasionally involved a military presence, have been long used to protect environmental assets and wildlife from human activities such as poaching, logging, invasive species. In climate change discourse, the notion of ‘safe havens’ have been used to describe parcels of forested land in developing countries to be protected in order to offset emissions from industrial processes in developed countries; to prescribe the need to protect and regenerate ecologically sensitive areas such as coasts and hill-slops for Disaster Risk Reduction purposes; and in popular debate, to identify the safest location globally to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Western governments could consider establishing a traditional military safe haven in a foreign country to protect populations have been displaced by climatic events such as prolonged drought or weather shock such as a cyclone. Displaced groups may be at risk of direct attack from hostile parties operating in the country or vulnerable simply due to lacking the basics that sustain life.

Establishing a safe haven to protect refugees and internally displaced persons has strong precedent. For example, Operation Provide Comfort in 1991 involved UK and US, with Turkey deploying 17,000 over an area of 21,000 square kilometres in Northern Iraq in 1991 in order to safeguard some 450,000 Kurdish refugees before they were able to return home.

Forecasts of the number of people facing displacement and migration as a consequence of sudden-onset (ie. cyclones) and slow-onset (ie protracted drought) climate-related factors vary from about 200 million by 2050 to more than 1 billion people.