Forced to flee or too poor to leave: how climate change affects refugees
On this year’s World Refugee Day, a record number of people are displaced – some 110 million, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR. People continue to be forced from their homes by conflict, persecution and insecurity, and increasingly by disasters related to climate change.
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A record 108.4 million were displaced by the end of 2022, according to UNHCR, a figure estimated to have risen to 110 million by the end of May with the outbreak of fighting in Sudan.
Of last year’s total, 35.3 million were refugees, people who crossed an international border in search of safety, while many more – 62.5 million people, or 58 percent – were displaced within their home countries.
More than half of all new internal displacements in 2022 were caused by disasters such as floods, storms and droughts, says the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
Over 32 million people were displaced by natural disasters last year, including floods in Pakistan and India, tropical storms in the Philippines, a heavy rainy season in Nigeria, Typhoon Muifa in China and Cyclone Sitrang in Bangladesh, and drought in Somalia and Ethiopia.
While many have since been able to return home, 8.7 million people remain internally displaced in 88 countries and territories by the end of 2022.
‘Climate refugees’
Disasters caused by extreme weather are becoming more frequent and more severe as climate change worsens.
Global warming also has other slow-motion effects that help push people to move, such as wiping out incomes from tourism or farming, or driving conflict over land and other dwindling resources.
The World Bank has estimated that without urgent action, more than 216 million people could be internally displaced by 2050 due to climate change, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, and South Asia.
Displacements across borders are also expected to rise. Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale” if sea levels continue to rise.
It is not known how many people have already left their country because of climate change. The UN’s special rapporteur for human rights and climate change, Ian Fry, estimates that it could be in the hundreds of thousands every year.
“At the moment there's not a lot of international displacement. Nevertheless, that may happen in the future. Where it is happening certainly is in Africa and parts of Latin America, where there are large numbers of people being displaced now,” he told RFI.
No legal status
Such people are not officially classed as “climate change refugees”, since they don’t fall into the categories defined by the UN Refugee Convention that governs universal asylum rights.
The result is that they “fall through the cracks as far as legal protection is concerned”, Fry said.
In a recent report, he argued that there was “an urgent need to provide a legal regime to protect the rights of persons displaced across international borders due to climate change” and recommended adding an optional protocol to the convention to recognise such people as refugees.
In the meantime, he said, individual countries should start offering humanitarian visas to people forced to flee the effects of climate change – as Argentina began doing last year for people from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
“We can’t ignore the fact that more and more people are being displaced every day as a consequence of climate change, and those people are not going to go away,” Fry told RFI. “We have to give proper protection to those people.”
Caught in 'climate traps'
Climate refugees would remain hard to define even if the UN convention were amended, since it can be difficult – if not impossible – to separate climate change from other factors such as poverty or conflict.
In fact, experts from the UN's International Organisation for Migration have argued that creating a special category could even prove counterproductive for the poorest migrants, who are likely to move for a combination of reasons and may struggle to prove that climate factors were the single biggest driver.
Analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggests that climate change may actually work to prevent the most vulnerable people from migrating, since it worsens poverty and leaves them without the means to move.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also refers to “climate traps”: the phenomenon whereby refugees and internally displaced people disproportionately find themselves sheltering in areas that are highly exposed to climate hazards, while at the same time facing too many legal and economic obstacles to leave.
Opira's story
Opira Bosco Okot knows about climate traps firsthand.
He fled the conflict in South Sudan eight years ago, when he was 19, running through the bush to cross into Uganda.
Registered at the Palabek Refugee Settlement just across the border, he says that he and other displaced people used to grow food and collect firewood on land they were allocated – but climate change has made it harder and harder to get by.
“People have cultivated maize, and the maize has dried up ... Rain just came recently in June. And June used to be almost the time when people are already eating their maize,” he told RFI.
Scarcity of resources has fuelled tensions with the host community, he says, with locals seeking to take land back from refugees and attacking them when they try to cut trees for wood. And the growing financial pressure on families has led to children dropping out of school when their parents can no longer afford fees.
Meanwhile people who returned to South Sudan after fighting died down there struggled to cultivate crops, especially after floods displaced cattle herders who then took over farmland in other parts of the country.
Some returnees ended up coming back to the camp in Uganda, Okot says, where the situation remains grave.
He told RFI: “Everywhere, the place where we have refuge now and back in South Sudan, climate change has drastically made people to lose hope about their possibility of surviving in the future.”
Two years ago, while he was studying economics at university in Kampala, Okot founded The Leads, an organisation that works to promote awareness of climate change, encourage tree planting around Palabek and support children to stay in education.
He says locally led, cross-cutting interventions are the best way to address the effects of climate change on refugees.
“Solutions can actually exist within the communities that are affected,” Okot says.
He adds: “Climate change needs to be involved in all sectors [whether education or peace-building] ... It can’t now stand alone because climate change leads to all of this.”
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