Environmental changes and displacement : the regional cooperation in protecting environmentally displaced people

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Environmental changes, particularly those related to climate change, make people lose their entire livelihood and get displaced. Even though it is the case that desperately needs for international legal and institutional frameworks to involve in protecting the ‘environmentally displaced people (EDP),’ there are protection gaps among those frameworks: some people can get protections while others cannot. It is argued that a source state should prevent the affected people from being displaced by taking the responsibility upon itself. However, the argument about the state’s responsibility is inadequate to resolve the problems related to environmental displacement since most source states are too poor and deprived to protect their own population from devastating natural disasters.
This research, therefore, is based on the assumption that regional frameworks could protect the EDP and address the relevant problems by playing an intermediate role between international and national frameworks. Observing pattens of environmental displacement in each region, this research examines how three regional organizations, i.e., the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Pacific Islands Forum, have engaged in protecting the EDP.
This research reaches the conclusion that the regional frameworks carry out good protections for the EDP and provide existing international and national frameworks with the meaningful insight.