Leading experts on migration yesterday rejected calls for a new international treaty to help people displaced by climate change, saying such an agreement is neither practical nor feasible.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution, the panel of academics and policy leaders said addressing the needs of a still-unknown number of people who may be forced to leave their homes because of increased floods, droughts and other climate-related changes is critical. But, they argued, the legal gaps remain too broad and nations too reluctant for a new comprehensive treaty to work.

"In the migratory world, states have been very reticent to undertake binding legal agreements," said Michele Klein-Solomon, permanent observer of the International Organization for Migration to the United Nations.

She noted that most states are unwilling to subject their decisions about whom to allow in and for how long to an international body. Moreover, she and others noted, the question of how to negotiate such a treaty is complicated by a number of factors -- not the least being the difficulty in pinpointing climate change alone as a reason for leaving one's land.

"There is very little political appetite for a new international instrument," agreed Jane McAdam, a nonresident fellow at Brookings and director of the International Refugee and Migration Law Project at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

McAdam argued for a "soft law framework" that would bring together guiding principles to help displaced people but would not force governments to consider new obligations.

New field of study

Over the course of this decade, climate-induced migration has gone from a little-understood phenomenon to a hot new field of study. Numbers remain elusive. Klein-Solomon noted that experts project anywhere from 25 million to 2 billion people could be displaced -- and the issue is often clouded by alarmist calls for action by environmental groups.

Yet the problem is real and is happening now. Last year, drought forced the island of Tuvalu to shutter schools and hospitals and declare a state of emergency; neighboring Tokelau's water supply dwindled so low it was dependent on bottled water shipped in from Samoa. And just last month, the government of Kiribati said it is negotiating to buy land in Fiji, preparing for the possibility that rising sea levels might force the country's population of 113,000 to resettle.

McAdam said each country's issues are unique and complicated and argued that environmental activists' penchant for calling those displaced by climate change "climate refugees" -- while perhaps useful for advocacy -- is part of the problem.

"It's at best pre-emptive and at worst offensive," she said, arguing that leaders of small island nations have themselves rejected the term.

"The Kiribati president said to me, 'When you talk about refugees, you are putting the stigma on the victims, not the offenders,'" she recalled.

Adaptation puzzles

Meanwhile, McAdam argued, "refugee" is a legal term of art under the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, and calling climate migrants refugees -- or treating them as such -- ignores major differences.

Among them: Climate change impacts do not pick on people of a certain ethnicity, set of beliefs or gender, so no human agency can be held responsible for prosecuting a specific people. Most movement is expected to be internal within countries, gradual and possibly even temporary, while refugee services focus on people in immediate danger.

If major emitting countries like the United States or European nations were held formally responsible for causing climate migration, those might be the very places such "refugees" would want to migrate.

Importantly, Klein-Solomon said, while refugees are traditionally victims of their governments, in the case of climate change, many countries are trying to work with people to help them cope with environmental degradation. She called for more countries to integrate the needs of displaced people into their national adaptation plans and urged financial help from the international community.

"The better that we plan and anticipate, the less there will be loss of life ... and the better people will fare," she said.