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]