Science under siege

 

We need continued innovation to stay on top of global challenges.

The horizon looks bright thanks to science and technology (photo by author in Montenegro).

The Happiest Country Rejects Divisiveness

 

People in Finland are getting tired of cuts to the welfare state and the anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent years.

On Sunday, April 14^th, Finland had regional and local elections where subnational units, cities and communes elected their representatives. The results were a radical turnaround from the previous national elections in 2023, that ushered in the current right-wing coalition government. This time, the opposition Social Democratic Party gained the most and became the largest party, while the coalition government partners generally lost their shares. Most significantly, the anti-immigration Finns Party suffered a crushing blow.

I arrived in Helsinki soon after and was able to gauge the sentiments of some of the denizens of the capital city where I was born and spent the first 25 years of my life. The admittedly completely unscientific sample consisting of people in my circle nevertheless provided some insights into why this change happened. Mind you, the people I talked with represent a range of very different political views, although they all are from Helsinki and all have been academically educated.

Since the fall of the government of the Social Democratic prime minister Sanna Marin (famous for her social media presence, featuring dancing and partying), Finland has been governed by a right-wing coalition led by Petteri Orpo of the largest conservative party in the country, the National Coalition Party (NCP). In the parliamentary system of Finland where there currently are nine national parties represented in the parliament, no single party will ever come even close to garnering an absolute majority of votes. Consequently, all governments are coalition governments pulled together by the biggest winner of any election. The current government brings together members from the NCP, the Swedish People´s Party (SFP/RKP), the Christian Democrats, and the populist Finns Party. SFP and the Christians are minor players, respectively with 4.3% and 4.2% of the votes in the 2023 elections, but Orpo brought them along to pull together enough for a ruling majority.

The Finns Party with their 20.1% share of the votes in the 2023 election rose to the second place just behind NCP. With this, they laid claim to a large number of seats in the government, including that of the Minister of Finance: Riikka Purra’s rather extreme views regarding immigrants have shocked many citizens, while gaining approval from her supporters.

The government embarked on an unabashed assault on the welfare state that has long been the foundation of the Finnish society, as in its Nordic neighbors. The government policies have focused on cutting public services, including support to health care, students and the unemployed. International development assistance faces reductions of one-quarter of the funding. The government program also includes tax cuts for firms and the wealthy, while the value added tax was increased resulting in higher costs for everyone, including those with the fewest means.

Finland has been ranked the world’s happiest country for eight years in a row. Most of my compatriots scoff at this distinction: we don’t feel that we’re particularly happy—and certainly don’t show it by dancing or hugging each other or smiling excessively. In fact, there’s an old saying in Finland advising us that s/he who is happy should hide their happiness (Kell’ onni on se onnen kätkeköön). The UN-sponsored World Happiness Report ranks countries based on a single question of subjective feeling. But it also looks into areas such as income, healthy life expectancy, social support, generosity, freedom to make life choices, and perceptions of corruption. It clearly doesn’t measure individual happiness. Molly Young in a perceptive article in the New York Times Magazine makes the distinction between “affective” and “evaluative” happiness. The Finnish kind is more the latter, like contentedness.

The fact that Finland has ranked so high on this happiness list for such a long time is largely due to the extensive welfare state. Finland is a high-income country with relatively small differences between the rich and poor, at least compared with the USA. We have world class education (although the standards have sunk somewhat in recent years) and universal healthcare. We have a lengthy life expectancy, which stems partly from that access to healthcare, but also from the clean environment and relatively healthy lifestyle, with most people enjoying outdoors activities in nature. Importantly, the Finns have a high level of trust in each other—a lost wallet is likely to be returned to the rightful owner; and we generally trust our elected officials and government employees to be honest. It’s one of the least corrupt countries in the world (which obviously doesn’t mean everyone is squeaky clean).

The welfare state is of course expensive and has resulted in soaring public debt. It reached 82.1% of GDP in the last quarter of 2024 (which is bad, or not so bad, depending on what you compare with; for neighboring Sweden the percentage is just 46.18% but for the mighty USA it is 97.8%—and counting). Maintaining the welfare state translates into a high rate and highly progressive taxation, which is a constant complaint you hear in Helsinki. The current government’s strategy is to shift the tax burden from firms and wealthy individuals to the everyman, relying on the universally discredited trickle-down theory. When it cuts services at the same time, the result is people being squeezed. Which is not popular.

As a result, the biggest winner in the April elections were the Social Democrats, which collected 22.5% of the vote and became the largest party. The voters’ message was clear: no more cuts. However, the money has to come from somewhere. A professor friend of mine, who is quite unhappy with the current government, also indicated that he would not vote for the Social Democrats because of their profligate spending.

One of the issues plaguing Finland is productivity, which is affected by the population structure. Like most European countries, Finland’s population is aging rapidly (most Asian countries, too, including China and Japan are facing the same trend). Another scientist friend of mine attributed many of Finland’s economic problems to this fundamental issue. The dependency ratio—that is, persons below 15 or over 65 years of age compared to working age population—is now 61.1, with 23.6% of people older than 65. With the below-replacement birth rate of just 1.3 children per woman, and the longevity (79.0 years for men and 84.2 years for women), aging of the population structure is inevitable

Except for immigration. Without it, the Finnish population actually decreased by 17,956 people in 2023. In the same year, net migration to the country was 57,914, thus more than compensating for the decline. The immigrants also tend to be younger, working age adults. Like elsewhere in Europe and the United States, immigration is a hot political issue. The neighboring countries—Russia, Estonia and Sweden—have always been top origins of immigrants, with the addition of Ukrainians since Russia’s attack on the country (while the inflow of Russians has been halted by closed borders). However, it is the immigrants and asylum seekers from countries like Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, and Kurds from Iran and Turkey, who get most of the attention.

The Finns Party built their platform largely on opposing immigration and they were for some years very successful in their strategy. Now the latest election results suggest otherwise. They received only 7.8% of the vote in the regional elections and even less (7.6%) at the municipal level.

Russia with which Finland shares a 1,340 km-long border is a problematic neighbor, not least in recent years. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and beyond prompted Finland to abandon its traditional neutrality and join NATO in 2024. This decision was supported by an overwhelming majority of Finns, including those I talked with. The highly popular President Alexander Stubb has provided solid leadership in the country and beyond when it comes to foreign policy. (Stubb who started his presidency in 2024 came from NCP. However, in Finland when elected, the president habitually gives up his party affiliation to truly unify the entire nation.)

One friend, an art historian told me that, while she has never been a fan of Russia and has never visited Moscow, she used to travel regularly to St. Petersburg, a cosmopolitan city with handsome architecture and great art collections, only about 380 km from Helsinki. There used to be a lot of cross-border traffic while the border was open. My friend confessed to being a bit nostalgic about the trips but she accepts that the city being off-limits is the price we have to pay.

All parties, including the traditionally anti-NATO Left Alliance, supported Finland’s membership in the military alliance. However, a recent poll shows a decrease in trust in NATO since President Trump has cast doubt on American commitment to come to the aid of fellow NATO members. Still, two-thirds of the Finns support NATO membership. Due to Russia’s proximity and the wars Finland fought with the Soviet Union (1939; and 1941-42), Finland, unlike many other Western European countries, never neglected its own defense or relied solely on US security guarantees. In 2023, it spent 2.4% of its GDP on defense and has pledged to increase spending to 3% before the end of the decade. This obviously poses further budgetary challenges and competes with other needs of the welfare state.

Finland is a country where people live close to nature and it is not surprising that the Greens have been relatively strong. This time around, too, they gathered 9.1% of the vote. I was curious why more Finns don’t vote for the Greens (in fact, their share nationally was almost identical to that of the Left Alliance). I asked two of my friends—a musician and a university professor—about their views. Both gave similar answers, having to do with too broad a coalition of special interests, which dilutes the focus and reduces the excitement regarding the Green agenda. This influence of special interests may be similar to the situation of the Democratic Party in the US.

So far, I’ve written about the country as a whole. Helsinki is a bit of an anomaly. Of Finland’s 5.6 million people, about 1.4 million live in the capital region. There NCP remains dominant, although the Social Democrats almost caught up with them. Although the Greens lost somewhat as compared with the 2021 municipal elections, they still remained the third largest party with 17.9% of the vote. In Helsinki, the Finns Party received only 5.5% of the vote. This reflects the fact that Helsinki is the wealthiest, best educated and most cosmopolitan place in the country. Both the NCP and the Social Democrats are largely supported by urbanites and well-educated people. The same goes for the Greens, while the Finns Party and the Center Party tend to be popular outside of the cities.

Like elsewhere, Finnish politicians and people alike face difficult choices. One fundamental tension is between the financial burden of maintaining the welfare state and the growing fiscal deficits. The need to invest more into defense also competes with other priorities.

The Russian war against Ukraine and the generally unstable situation in Europe and the world, has diverted attention from other issues, such as climate change. Still, a recent survey by the Ministry of the Environment shows that almost everyone (91%) is worried about climate change and global biodiversity loss, and 97% of the respondents believe that clean nature enhances people’s health and well-being.

Another tension appears between the need to maintain Finland’s productivity and working-age population and the perceived problems caused by immigration. While Finland overall is still a fairly low-immigration country, as compared with many other European countries, such as France and Germany (apart from policy, there’s no doubt that the northern climate and the challenging language contribute to this), there has been an increase in recent years. This is felt especially with regard to non-European immigrants whose culture may make assimilation in the Finnish society harder. While 85% of immigrants live in cities, the opposition to them is highest outside, as the support to the Finns Party shows.

As population ages in all major regions of the world, except in Africa, and the UN projects that the global population will start shrinking during the second half of this century, many countries have tried establishing pronatal policies encouraging people to have more children. We do have to have a serious debate of population and whether its continued growth is needed or there are other ways to deal with the challenges (look especially to Japan). But that’s an entirely different discussion for another day.

It will be interesting to see which way future directions in the Finnish politics will turn. As a Finn living outside of the country for many years, I for one will be watching it carefully.

[Originally published at https://juhauitto.substack.com on May 12, 2025.]

Irakere pa gozar

 

What an evening. The packed Strathmore music center hall could barely contain itself during the 2-hour show by the Cuban pianist and band leader Chucho Valdés and Irakere, the band he established half a century ago. And here they were again, under the steerage of their legendary leader.

The 83-year old maestro was in excellent shape The sheer virtuosity of all of the players was stunning, but that’s not the point. The point is the musicality and the originality of the music, the joy and the genuine warmth. Irakere is primarily a jazz band but in a Cuban show people expect to dance. The usual strategy, Valdés has said, is for the band to play jazz for the first half of the concert, then switch to pure salsa.

There were three percussionists—one primarily on congas, another with bongos and other smaller percussion, and one behind a drum kit—who with their seamless interplay and polyrhythms provided the backbone of the music. The drummer was Horacio “El Negro” Hernández and one of the percussions was Roberto Jr. Vizcaino Torre, but I missed the name of the other. They were supplemented by the bassist José A. Gola on his 5-sting fretless guitar.

There were four horns, each with a distinct sound. Every one of them could hold their own with any bebop player. Early on in the concert, a lyrical Latin balled featured the tenor sax player Carlos Averhoff Jr. soloing on a soprano (his father, Carlos Averhoff Sr., was himself an influential saxophonist). I swear, this was possibly the best soprano sax solo I have ever witnessed—and I’ve seen them all, from Wayne Shorter down. The sound was just amazing and the fluidity of how he soloed before returning to the melody was reminiscent of Irakere’s original sax star, Paquito d’Rivera.

The maestro himself was dressed in white trousers and a dark blazer, sporting his trademark beret. He walked a bit stiffly but his pianistic abilities remain undiminished. He seems to be able to produce whatever he imagines on the keyboard—and his imagination is equally endless. There were moments when he’d play fast tremolo chords on his right hand, while soloing on the left. Take another early piece in the concert, a tango. It started with a Valdés solo intro which contained musical elements from Latin to free jazz—and a sudden quotation from Mozart for a few bars. In the main tango theme, the rhythm section joined in. Suddenly the swing changed totally and the tune turned into a piano trio jazz piece with a walking bass accompanying Chucho’s fast speed improvisations. Equally suddenly and seamlessly, the jam turned into a brief mambo as the percussionists rejoined, before leading back to the original tango.

We heard strong solos from the alto saxophonist Luis Beltrán and both trumpeters who provided a study in contrasts. The lead trumpeter Eddie de Armas Jr. played with the rubbery fluidity, associated with Duke Ellington’s long-time lead trumpeter William “Cat” Anderson, reaching stratospheric heights. His colleague, Osvaldo Fleiter, played some neat solos on flugelhorn, but the sound of his trumpet was broad and clear as a traditional Spanish horn player’s.

At midpoint, Chucho announced the arrival of the singer. Emilio Frias entered the stage in all black, except for a golden blazer. After that, the evening turned into an unmitigated salsa party. Despite the change in atmosphere, the band continued to play the complex arrangements sharply and with nuance. The dynamic range was remarkable, as a high point was reached with the horns blaring, only to be followed by a soft and sensitive sequence with delicate harmonies. On occasion, Valdés abandoned the piano and crossed the stage to stand in front of the horn section conducting them with his movements.

My jazz heart was rejoicing as people kept dancing and swaying during the lengthy instrumental passages. At one point, all horn players were trading fours on top of a one-chord salsa vamp producing truly inspiring snippets.

The crooner entirely captivated the audience, making us dance and sing along. The horn players produced the background vocals responding to the lead singer’s exhortations. I watched their elegantly synchronized, almost minimalistic dance steps while the rhythm was boiling.

When it came to end the show, the band didn’t just bow and walk away. They gathered into a cluster at the center stage. The horn players kept on playing their riff while the singer continued to sing as they all exited stage left. Needless to say, the audience would not allow their exit to be the end: loud claps and calls were rewarded by a lengthy encore.

I feel lucky that I finally, after all these decades of fandom, managed to catch Chucho Valdés and Irakere live.

The Eurasian Century, by Hal Brands

 

This is a fact-filled book written in a highly readable and lively style. I found it very satisfying on several fronts, although I can sympathize with some of the reviewers who disagree with Hal Brands’ point of view. He makes no effort to hide where he is coming from, seeing the democratic West as something worth defending, and the USA as the necessary guarantor to the free world.

 Brands draws upon the geopolitical theories and traditions of Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Nicholas Spykman, and others. This is one of the attractions of the book. As a trained geographer myself, I’ve always thought that geopolitics was unfairly criticized for decades. Sure, it was originally associated with the Swede Rudolf Kjellén and the German Friedich Ratzel both of whom were something of social Darwinists and whose ideas were embraced by the Nazis. Brand’s view is nuanced and his application of the perspective is intelligent. He sums it up: “Geopolitics tempered by democracy was stark but rarely evil. Geopolitics with an autocratic bent was poison, pure and simple” (p. 31). Bad application of an approach should not be a reason to ban the entire discipline (for example, genetics has been misused for bad purposes but it nevertheless is a vital science).

 The first two-thirds of the book is dedicated to a backward look at the 20^th century: the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the quarter century of peace and prosperity following the fall of the Soviet Union. The final part looks at the “second Eurasian century” which we are currently living and draws lessons from the past.

 It is easy to see why readers of a certain persuasion would object to Brand’s interpretation. He readily acknowledges the American mistakes and overreactions in building and defending a safe and free world. Often, in defending democracy, America ended up crushing it and supporting oppressive regimes that it saw to be on its side. Scores of people died in wars from Vietnam to Iraq and many smaller skirmishes. However, Brand is unabashedly of the view that the US-dominated world after World War II has been, in the balance, hugely positive to everyone, and that US involvement in the world—especially the central Eurasian continent and the surrounding seas—is a necessity for the world and its people to prosper.

 He does see the threat posed by rising isolationism. Although the book was published in 2025, the manuscript must have been completed prior to the November 2024 elections. Brand writes: “If America makes a habit of electing aspiring strongmen, it may not remain a democratic superpower. And don’t think for a second that troubled autocracies can’t bring a world of woe” (p. 219). Unfortunately, it seems this is where we stand for the moment.

 Although a multipolar world would seem desirable at the face of it, the contenders to fill the other pole posts—notably China and Russia—do not provide an attractive alternative. In fact, these revisionist powers represent illiberal authoritarian regimes that would limit free speech and civil liberties in their spheres of influence. Western Europe without the US will not be able to resist. Brand makes a strong case for a broad coalition of democracies to cooperate, in terms of politics and policy, innovation and technology, and military. Citing Harry Truman in 1948: “America must pay the price for peace.” Brand’s final warning: “There is no law of nature that expansion must fail and tyranny must be vanguished. There is no guarantee that history takes the path of progress” (p. 245).  As the book shows, the 20^th century history is full of examples where things could have gone badly wrong.

Adriatic by Robert D. Kaplan

Two-thirds through the book, Robert Kaplan worries that this book fits in no category: "It is not military strategy, political  science, original archival history, conventional long-form journalism, traditional travel writing, memoir, or literary criticism" (p.237). He's right about that, although it has elements of all or most of the above. Kaplan, a renowned geopolitical analyst, has written 20 books of which I have read about half a dozen before this one. It is thus clear that I like his writing and his perspective on contemporary affairs. His work is always anchored in history and geography, which gives it more depth than most others. (It has to be said that many academic geographers are highly critical of Kaplan's analysis, judging him to be something of a geographical determinist and of a somewhat conservative bent; I do not subscribe to this view and, on the contrary, appreciate Kaplan's traditional approach to political geography.)

This book was, however, a harder read than any of the others that I have read. Kaplan has a fascination with history that takes him way back in time to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He is also deeply interested in architecture and culture, including religion. Consequently, the early parts of the book, focusing on Trieste and Venice in Italy, are rather heavy, with much emphasis on the above aspects. Throughout the book, he expends much effort to pondering the relationship between the past powers (the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Venice...) and the influences of Catholism, Eastern Orthodoxism and Islam. There is also an extraordinary amount of introspection. 

At least to me, the book gets more interesting as the author travels down the eastern Adriatic coast, from Slovenia through Croatia, Montenegro and Albania ending up on the island of Corfu. In these parts, he talks more to people--historians and other academics, politicians, journalists and others--which adds much needed color and points of view bringing the analysis to recent history and the present. Kaplan, in my view, is in his own element when discussing the geopolitics of the region. I personally learned a lot about the history of the Adriatic and especially the Balkans.

In the final part, Kaplan ponders the future of Europe, not in the long term but what comes next and which way it will develop. He also discusses the state of nation states and the tensions between multiculturalism (as today experienced in cities), identity, and the nationalist and populist instincts that currently prevail. These are thoughtful passages.

How population characteristics shape our world, and how we can influence them

Jennifer D. Sciubba, currently President and CEO of Population Reference Bureau, is a political demographer. She is a leading expert in how population trends and composition affect politics and social relations -- and vice versa. This is what makes her analysis more interesting than your run-of-the-mill books on demography. My own background was originally in population geography, so the fundamentals that Sciubba explains in the book are very familiar to me.

Beyond those fundamentals, there is a lot of interesting and insightful in the book. For example, Sciubba points out that neither rapid population growth nor aging are per se not inherently problematic. Instead, their impact depends on the governance, political and economic circumstances. While fertility has dropped to below replacement levles, resulting in population shrinkage without immigration in most parts of the world (including Europe, North America, Japan, China, even Brazil), it remains very high in most of Africa where the societies' ability to accommodate the large cohorts of new entrants into labor force are generally weak. Sub-Saharan Africa contines to be the place with the largest growth in population. Almost 90% of world's population growth until mid-century will take place in lower-middle and low-income countries. This will pose challenges in terms of political stability and pressures to migrate. Sciubba also points out that it is not to poorest people from the poorest countries who migrate, because migration requires a certain amount of financial resources as well as skills to navigate the complex challenges of international migration. This fact casts doubt on the oft-heard justification for foreign aid to help people where they are, so that they will be discouraged to move.

A feature that makes Sciubba's book a lively read is her ample use of historical and current examples to demonstrate the more technical or theoretical points. They range from the impacts of China's one-child policy to the Rwandan genocide; from the relationship between aging societies and peace, to implications of Nigeria's youthful population. (I have to point out an odd slip: At one point, Sciubba places the southern African country of Botswana in the Sahel.)

Although Sciubba mentions climate change in several places, as acting as a stressor and as a driver of migration, it features fairly little in the book. That of course could be the focus of a separate book in itself.

A worthwhile and entertaining read, I'd recommend this book to anyone interesting in how population trends, fertility, mortality and migration shape society all over the world.

People on the Move - Climate Refugees

 

Environmental degradation and climate change add to migration pressures, which need to be addressed internationally for a more sustainable future.

Migration of people, driven by multifaceted crises, continues to surge, affecting millions globally. By mid-2022, 281 million people lived outside their birth country, some 40% of them forcibly displaced by the year's end due to conflict, persecution, or environmental degradation. Migration is not a singular event but a fluid process involving ongoing adaptation, often encompassing return or circular movements.

Most of displacement takes place within and between conflict-impacted countries in the global South, although most of the attention is given to those attempting to come to Europe and North America. According to the International Organization for Migration, there were 117 million displaced people at the end of 2022. Of these, 71.2 million were internally displaced.

The simple reason for this is that when people escape their own country, they usually end up in the neighboring one. Consequently, the biggest host country over the past seven years has been Türkiye (Turkey), because of the civil war in Syria (now that the situation there has calmed down, at least temporarily, many of the Syrian refugees are returning). For the same reason, Afghanistan’s neighbors—Pakistan and Iran—are also at the top of the list. The only Western country that makes it to the top-5 host countries is Germany. (If we don’t only count refugees, the busiest country-to-country migration corridor is between Mexico and the United States.) [These data come from the 2024 World Migration Report by the International Organization for Migration.]

Conflict remains a primary driver for people seeking refuge, with armed violence displacing millions, as seen in Ukraine and Gaza. Civilians disproportionately bear the brunt of modern warfare, with limited protections despite international conventions. Environmental factors, including floods, droughts, and rising sea levels, exacerbate migration pressures, with projections estimating over 100 million annual climate migrants by 2050. Climatic hazards should be divided into two categories: sudden-onset and slow-onset. The former refer to disastrous events, such as the 2022 floods in Pakistan, which forced a large number of people to flee, but many of whom returned afterwards. The slow-onset hazards consist of gradual but more or less permanent changes, like the drying up of Guatemala’s agricultural lands.

Closely associated with climate change as a driver of migration is increasing food insecurity. As we show in our book Migrant Health and Resilience published some months ago, health vulnerabilities, including exposure to disease and inadequate care, compound the challenges migrants face. Women, children, and displaced populations are particularly at risk, underscoring the need for targeted social and healthcare interventions.

Environmental refugees (or climate refugees) is a relatively new term used for people who move because of environmental pressures or because climate change has rendered their livelihoods untenable. In fact, international law does not yet recognize this category. The only legally binding treaties pertaining to refugees are the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. The Convention defines refugees as people fleeing their country of origin due to a credible fear of persecution based on race, religion, national origin, or membership in a particular political or social group. That does not cover climate refugees for the obvious reason that at the time when this treaty was created, few people had any notion of climate change. Legal scholars, like Caitlan Sussman, argue that there should be an expanded international framework for protecting climate refugees, and that the strongest solution would be to amend the 1951 Convention.

Should these people be classified as climate refugees if their decision to migrate has been triggered by worsened environmental conditions making it hard for them to eke out a living in their places of origin? This determination is a tough one and there probably isn’t a one-size-fits-all definition.

It is notoriously difficult to parse together the motivations of people to move away from their home areas. Most people move to improve their opportunities to a decent living, some even for mere survival. The vast majority of people move within the borders of their own country. The great urbanization that the world has experienced over the past several decades has been driven by this process. More than half of us now live in cities. People from the countryside moved to the cities in search for employment opportunities, giving rise to vast shanties often on the outskirts of the largest urban areas in the country. In many cases, people still kept their homesteads in the countryside and often left their wives and families to tend to them.

The biggest shanty towns can be found around Karachi (Pakistan), Mexico City, Mumbai (India), Nairobi (Kenya) and Cape Town (South Africa). These five settlements have a combined population of some 5.7 million people. Their hazardous geographical locations often render them particularly vulnerable to natural hazards from storms and floods to landslides.

Others move across national borders, many, as we know, seeking refuge in Europe or in North America, creating the politically explosive situation in which we currently live. The rapid increase in the number of migrants from the South has led to calls for border closings and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in the global West.

The 16^th Conference of Parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) finished earlier this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Conference President, the Saudi Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture, Abderrahman Al-Fadhli, emphasized how drought, land degradation, and resource loss are causing migration and fueling conflict. According to UNCCD, up to 40% of the world’s agricultural lands are already degraded and this trend continues unabated. Of course, not all of this degradation is due to climate change. Much of it is simple overuse or utilization of poor agricultural practices, but often climate change is at least part of the picture. In the past, it was possible for farmers and herders to move when one area became depleted, but today places are too densely populated to allow for opening up new land when old becomes exhausted.

One of the worst affected areas is the Sahel, the arid belt between the Sahara desert and wetter and more fertile areas further south in Africa. The transboundary Lake Chad, straddling the Central and West African countries of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, has lost nine-tenths of its area in just a few decades starting in the early 1970s, leading to food shortages, population displacement and conflict. At the COP16, Nigeria’s Minister of Environment, Balarabe Abbas Lawal, placed this ecological fact at the center of the rise of Boko Haram, the violent fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization. Again, it’s hard to tell exactly how much of this dramatic shrinkage has been due to human-induced climate change. Paleoclimate research shows that the lake has experienced wet and dry periods for thousands of years. Human factors, such as extraction of water for irrigation have also contributed. Recent research published in Nature suggests that climatic fluctuations are indeed the main reason for Lake Chad’s loss of water but that the lake is not disappearing; in fact the southern pool has been rather stable and even slightly increasing in recent years following local rainfall and river discharge. The fact remains, that the availability of water and the interannual variability of rainfall, combined with growing human population, continues to cause increasing pressure on natural resources and conflict.

While COP16 was meeting in Riyadh in early-December 2024, the Syrian opposition forces led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani overran the country’s capital, Damascus, sending the dictator Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Moscow (birds of a feather flock together). Syria is a large country at a strategic crossroads in the Middle East. It has a complex ethnic and religious makeup, and many actors in the region and beyond (from Turkey and Iran to Russia and Israel) meddling in its affairs. Its geography matters. Rising temperatures, decreased rainfall and water scarcity, combined with environmental pollution has made farming difficult. It drove large numbers of people from the countryside into cities causing conflicts, acting as an accelerator to the bloody 13-year civil war.

On the Western hemisphere, climate change and environmental degradation play a role in the immigration crisis on the US southern border. Missing rains and subsequent land degradation in Central America, especially Guatemala and Honduras, has rendered farming increasingly precarious decimating rural livelihoods. Jobs in the cities of these countries are hard to come by, the political situation is oppressive, and violent criminal gangs prey on people making life dangerous. Consequently, many people make the decision to try their luck and make the hazardous trek to reach the rich North.

All these cases demonstrate how climate interacts with human and political factors in creating fragility, conflict and violence—and consequent pressures to migrate.

In other parts of the world the issue is too much water. This is particularly true for low-lying coastal regions subject to sea-level rise and coastal storms. How countries and cities cope with these calamities depends very much on the resources available to them and how stable their decision-making structures are. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level but the country has been able to thrive under these conditions for centuries, while poorer countries from Bangladesh to Nigeria are hard pressed to deal with the increasing coastal hazards.

Island nations and especially small island developing states (SIDS) are an extreme case where climate-related environmental changes may pose an existential threat. Many of us have seen pictures of the foreign minister of Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific Island nation, delivering a message to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP26 in 2023 standing knee-deep in water. Tuvalu has also launched plans to become the world’s first entirely digital nation, so that it can preserve key aspects of its culture and national identity even if the islands will be covered by waves.

Migration reshapes social and economic landscapes both in the countries of origin and in receiving countries, straining resources and labor markets while fostering cultural and demographic shifts. Sustainable responses demand addressing migration drivers as well as improved resettlement systems. Irrespective of legal recognition, addressing climate-induced migration requires proactive strategies and recognition of shared global responsibilities. Ultimately, promoting harmonious integration and wellbeing for both migrants and host communities remains a critical challenge in an era of unprecedented human displacement.

[Originally published at: https://juhauitto.substack.com/p/people-on-the-move-climate-refugees]