People on the Move as the World Warms
Eliza Barclay
Natural climate change and natural disasters have been disrupting and displacing humans for millennia. But now man-made climate change is challenging the way we understand and forecast these phenomena. Among the many questions stumping climate researchers is how to measure the ways the warming planet is uprooting people, and perhaps even driving them into conflict.
The numbers, though, are hard to pinpoint and constantly changing: the International Office of Migration, an intergovernmental organization established in 1951, estimates that 200 million people will be forced to move because of the changing climate by 2050, while other groups have said it could be as high as 700 million.
Of particular concern is the mounting frequency and intensity of climate-related events like heat waves, floods, droughts and storms. In 2008 alone, more than 20 million people were displaced by climate-related sudden-onset disasters such as floods and storms, according to a 2009 study by the Norwegian Refugee Council. Of the 20 disasters in 2008 with the highest levels of displacement, 17 were in Asia. Scientists expect climate-related disasters to continue to increase as the climate warms and meteorological, hydrological and climatological systems adjust to new conditions.
Bangladesh, a densely packed coastal country, most of which is less than 40 feet above sea level and streaked with rivers, is especially vulnerable. Sea level rise together with storm surges linked to cyclones could inundate up to 25 percent of the country, according to a study by the United Nations Environment Program. And evacuations of some of the tiniest, low-lying atolls and islands in the world have already begun: in 2009, some 2,600 people from the Carteret Islands, part of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific, were instructed to move to the nearby Solomon Island of Bougainville.
Drought is another devastating outcome of the fragile interplay between precipitation and evaporation, whether sudden or protracted. As precipitation over regions like the Sahel in Africa declines and evaporation increases from higher temperatures, drought has become more commonplace, threatening the security of food and people, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Much of the discussion to date on the new climate patterns that have or will kindle migration has focused on the most conspicuous risks like sea level rise and flooding. But according to Charles Ehrhart, climate change coordinator for CARE International, another equally important and hastening factor has been overlooked: changing rainfall patterns, which are difficult for scientists to monitor and measure.
"Science is poor at capturing the nature of rainfall," says Ehrhart. "We measure annual averages but we don't know when it comes and how it comes. If you are a farmer depending on rain-fed agriculture, when it falls is at least as important as how much falls."
Around 90 percent of Africans depend on agriculture for their livelihoods - many are subsistence farmers who only grow enough food to feed themselves and their families. Many parts of Africa are already considered "water stressed," a condition that will be exacerbated by unpredictable and unreliable rainfall from climate change.
Recently, Ehrhart visited the Ivory Coast where he met several young men in an Abidjan slum who said they'd migrated there from Niger. "What they explained was that stresses on pasture and lack of water for livestock meant that being a traditional pastoralist was no longer a viable livelihood," Ehrhart said. "They felt their culture's traditional [way of life] was a dead end." CARE and other organizations working with migrants in urban slums around the world say they are noticing climate as a reason why people leave their homes, but the phenomenon remains hard to measure.
Within the humanitarian community, there is some disagreement about what to call these new migrants. Some people who study displacement from climate change, like Ehrhart, aren't comfortable with the term "climate refugee" because "refugee" implies an escape from persecution and crossing a border. Climate, or environmental, migrants are not moving for ethnic or political reasons, and to date are not eligible for any kind of refugee status or benefit, he said.
Yet others are more open to extending refugee status to them.
"This is a highly complex issue, with global organizations already overwhelmed by the demands of conventionally-recognized refugees... We should prepare now, however, to define, accept and accommodate this new breed of ‘refugee'," United Nations Under Secretary-General Hans van Ginkel said recently on the UN Day for Disaster Reduction.
Other scientists, exploring the human impact of climate change, are looking at whether conflict over resources stressed by climate change may be spurring displacement or even war.
In a startling paper published in November 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers argued that climate change could increase the risk of African civil war by nearly 60 percent in 2030 relative to 1990, with huge potential costs to human livelihoods. Looking at data from 1980 to 2002, they found that civil wars were significantly more likely in warmer-than-average years. The researchers concluded that when temperatures rise, African farmers suffer and become more susceptible to participating in armed conflict.
"The results were really surprising especially in their magnitude," said Marshall Burke, a doctoral student in agricultural and resource economics at the University of California-Berkeley and lead author of the study. "You would expect to see some relationship between agricultural productivity and changes in civil conflict, and everyone's picture of failed harvest is drought. But if you look statistically, you see just as strong a signal from temperature as precipitation."
There are two ways higher temperatures can affect crops, Burke says. For one, heat will evaporate more water out of the soil, effectively creating drought conditions without a change in rainfall. Temperature also changes how quickly plants develop, accelerating growth and reducing overall yield. Burke and his colleagues ultimately suggest that governments should aid farmers in adapting to extreme conditions and avoiding conflict by developing drought-tolerant crop varieties, training and incentives to use them, or improving irrigation.
Burke's pioneering study has broad implications for the potential risk of displacement from climate-related conflict. But according to Nils Petter Gleditsch, a professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, its results rely only on national-level data and a short time period. One of the challenges of studying climate patterns and conflict (or migration) is a lack of good local level data that can correlate specific conflicts to specific rainfall or temperature patterns.
And, Gleditsch says, the fear of climate change leading to increased conflict is questionable in light of the larger global trend of decreasing armed conflict since the end of the Cold War. "I see it as relatively unlikely that the conflict-generating effect of climate change will outweigh trends towards fewer and less severe wars," Gleditsch said. "If I were to venture a hypothesis, the kind of conflict most likely generated by climate would be local and relatively small-scale conflicts."
Even if the link between conflict and climate may not cause widespread displacement, humanitarian agencies are already concerned about extreme weather events and natural disasters that affect health. Droughts and tropical cyclones can up the risk of food and water shortages and food and water-borne diseases. Heavy precipitation events, meanwhile, like storms and flooding, can cause death by drowning and infectious diseases like cholera and diarrhea.
Humanitarian groups have begun to create climate divisions to prepare for both health risks and displacement. The Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, for example, has started to push Red Cross national chapters in Kenya and Tanzania to team up with meteorological services to use early warning information about rainfall patterns for preventive health care, according to Lina Nerlander, a health and climate specialist for the Climate Centre. Health workers can use early warning systems to promote awareness and education on how to avoid exposure and when to seek care for vector-borne diseases like malaria or dengue that may resurge from climatic conditions.
But there is still a very long way to go in both understanding the potential human impacts of climate change and preparing for them.
And, as Ehrhart says, the main focus for governments should still be mitigating climate change to avoid some of the worst possible impacts. "The single biggest thing countries can do to avert large-scale displacement is to make serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions," Ehrhart said.
Eliza Barclay is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New York Times.
Would be more interesting to hear more on climate change and the human activities that contribute to it.
— DESDERIA KIHALALWA on 2010-08-05