Caroline Lucas

speaker

487 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Caroline Lucas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The Rest Is Politics · The Truth About Climate Migration – It's More Complicated Than You Think · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

And I wanted to maybe make it more complicated because I wanted to talk about this term climate refugee because it's a term that quite often gets used by people who are absolutely in good faith and wanting to make sure that there is some kind of international protection for people who are on the move, notwithstanding that they might not be the majority.

But

I wonder what you think about the use of that term.

Is it helpful or does it carry with it some risks as well?

One area of concern, obviously, is that

With people on the move, having some level of international protection feels really important.

And while many would argue, and I would agree with them, that opening up the refugee convention, for example, to suddenly try to create a new category of refugee would be incredibly dangerous as well as very difficult because there'll be certainly people out there who would love to use that as an opportunity to weaken all of the protections.

If we're not going to do that, but we do accept that probably some greater level of legal protection is necessary, do you have any sense of what that could look like?

There are quite a lot in operation, aren't there?

I wanted to speak to someone on the front lines of this complexity, someone who knows firsthand the heartbreak of watching her own country come to terms with its very fragile future.

So I was delighted to be joined by Amanath Shona, who served as the Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Technology in the Maldives from 2021 to 2023.

She led the Maldives delegation to the UN Climate Talks, and she played a leading role in the creation of an international fund to compensate countries affected by climate loss and damage.

Here's our conversation.

I wanted to come to the issue of migration because that's the focus of this particular episode, looking at the issue of climate-driven migration.

And I wanted to ask you whether or not the phrase climate refugees is something that you think is helpful.

Is it useful?

Would you ever use it?

Or do you think there are real problems with that as well?

I just wanted to come on to the difficult issue about what happens if best efforts to properly protect the Maldives isn't enough at some point.

I know, for example, that a country like the Pacific island of Tuvalu, also very low-lying, has negotiated the world's first bilateral agreement on climate mobility with Australia.

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