How Does Climate Change Affect Migration?

Climate change has many well-known destructive effects, such as melting ice caps, rising sea levels, the destruction of wildlife habitats, an increase of extreme weather conditions, and even an increase in the likelihood of widespread disease. One problem that is less publicised, however, is climate-caused displacement. Here’s what you need to know about how climate change affects migration.

What is the correlation?

There is plenty of evidence that shows the link between migration and climate change issues such as extreme weather events and rising sea levels. In March 2019, Tropical Cyclone Idai struck Mozambique, leaving 146,000 people displaced. In the Pacific Islands, the rising sea level has left eight islands submerged, with two more soon to follow. In 2017, approximately 22.5–24 million people were displaced by sudden-onset weather events such as flooding, storms, and forest fires.

As well as these instances of extreme weather, climate change is also contributing to desertification, air pollution, and a loss of biodiversity, all of which can seriously affect the availability of resources, especially when large areas of vegetation are destroyed by wildfires or the conditions no longer allow crop growth. When climate change affects resource availability, people are consequently displaced and forced to migrate elsewhere in order to survive.

As stated in an article on The Brookings Institution website, ‘whether in terms of limited access to clean water, food scarcity, agricultural degradation, or violent conflict, climate change will intensify these challenges and be a significant push factor in human migration patterns’. This is compounded by the increasing prevalence of natural disasters and extreme weather events.

What are the effects?

Discussing the findings of her research into the link between climate change and migration, Cristina Cattaneo, a senior researcher at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei states that ‘climate-driven emigration is associated with a worsening of local opportunities and migrants move where they have better chances of finding a job given their current constraints’.

The research also found that when climate change affected agricultural income in middle-income countries, emigration from rural to urban areas or other countries was more likely.

Cattaneo’s findings uncovered another damaging correlation between climate change and migration, in that the income of the country affected by the climate crisis had an impact on how the population responded. In very poor countries, the study found that emigration levels were actually lower, as the lower agricultural productivity brought about by climate change exacerbated the population’s financial situation.

The result is that people from these areas can be left unable to pay migration costs and therefore become trapped in local poverty with no means to improve their situation, as the resources have been depleted.

As those from higher-income countries are more likely to be able to emigrate to escape the effects of climate change and improve their financial situation, this problem only further increases the wealth gap.

What can be done?

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are an organisation who do amazing work in aiding refugees and forcibly displaced communities. UNHCR are well aware of the link between climate change and forced migration and have been working on how to deal with the climate-caused displacement since the mid-2000s.

This is a key issue for UNHCR — they continue to work with states to develop the legal and policy approaches that would protect people affected by climate change displacement. However, they also believe that the international community needs to move from a ‘crisis management’ standpoint to one that makes planning for future risk the focus.

In the Brookings article mentioned earlier, it is suggested that medium-term investments could provide some more resilience to climate change effects: ‘the climate change factors that push migration in Northwest Africa could — at least in part — be addressed by supporting irrigation infrastructure, providing food supplies, fostering regional water cooperation, and supporting livelihood security’.

However, Erica Bower of the UNHCR believes that even better than these medium-term investments would be a risk management plan that looks forward 30 or 100 years and would reduce the chance of future climate-caused displacement.

How can you help?

UNHCR helps refugees and forcibly displaced people all over the world, but the number of people who are forced to migrate due to climate change could be drastically reduced if their proposals for a new approach where climate change displacement is proactively defended against is adopted by the international community.

Thankfully, it is very easy to support the work that UNHCR does, simply by using a charitable search engine like SearchScene. At SearchScene, we give 95% of our advertising profits to charities focused on fighting climate change and its effects, including UNHCR. By making SearchScene your new search engine and selecting UNHCR as your preferred charity, all of your searches will help towards their cause!

This article first appeared on Medium.