The April issue of Race & Class leads with a multi-layered and tightly-argued exposé by three academics of the supposedly green, empowering, and pro-women’s safety UNHCR Refugee Environmental Protection (REP) Fund’s project to use refugee labour in the Global South to generate carbon credits to be traded on global markets.
On the face of it, investing in clean cookstove and reforestation projects in and around refugee camps, and reducing CO2 (and CO2 equivalents) might seem like a good idea. But Nicholas Beuret, Matilda Fitzmaurice and David Harvie argue that in allowing the UNHCR’s corporate partners to use refugee labour to generate carbon credits (in a kind of ‘green bond’) the REP contributes to a ‘maladaptive labour cycle’ that works both directly and indirectly to use the labour of those displaced to maintain their own displacement while actually worsening environmental and climate outcomes.
With 1.5 per cent of the global population now forcibly displaced, and around a fifth ending up in camp stays from 10 to 15 years, the ‘green bond’ actually increases the likelihood of long-term containment within ‘camps’ governed by the wider logic of the securitisation of migratory flows.
All those who believe in the ‘greening of refugee camps’ need to read this devastating critique. International humanitarian refugee organisations, ecology and refugee and climate justice movements will benefit from understanding the complex arguments that surround the UNHCR’s REP Fund with its underlying message to venture philanthropists about efficient and ‘humanitarian ways to invest’.