CLIMATE DISPLACEMENT IN THE NEWS
Evidence indicates that refugee camps are disproportionately placed in climate-vulnerable regions prone to extreme weather, flooding, wildfires, and droughts. Indeed, such sights are often set up in notably inhospitable places, in a makeshift effort to distance them as far as possible from host communities fearful of disruption. The current effort to relocate Rohingya refugees to the remote, allegedly inhabitable Bhasin Char island is one notable example.
Ih nuudel, meaning ‘the big migration’ in Mongolian, is what locals have coined the migration in record numbers of rural populations to the capital of Ulaanbaatar. This pattern of migration has been going on for two decades in Mongolia due to various factors, but climate change is drastically exacerbating it. In recent years various international reports have begun highlighting the alarming rate of climatic variations recorded in Mongolia. Between 1940 and 2015 Mongolia had a confirmed increase in temperature of 2.24°C making it “one of the strongest climate warming signals on Earth.” Another report revealed that Mongolia is warming at a rate three times faster than that seen anywhere else on the globe. This is catastrophic for a nation known for its deep relation with the land.
With about 30 percent of Iraq covered in desert, all of these added climate problems, along with a population rapidly increasing, which we detailed in this earlier Spotlight, renders an already vulnerable population from conflict, geopolitical tensions, decades of sanctions, chronic poverty and corruption, rather fragile. It’s no wonder then that right now, thousands of families across Iraq continue to be displaced from their homes in rural parts of the country due to the loss of arable land and water scarcity.
Of those evacuees, The Fiji Times is reporting, 200 include “climate change refugees in Dreketi who were relocated more than a year ago” in the wake of cyclone Ana last year. The 200 villagers were relocated last from Navabatu last January after the storm’s impact sustained cracks in infrastructure.
2021 closed with yet another year of record forcibly displaced persons and the climate crisis played a major role driving over 84 million people out of their homes.
We already know that in 2020, three times as many people - 30.7 million - were internally displaced by the climate crisis than by conflict or violence. Numbers over the last decade don’t fair any better either, where twice as much displacement was triggered by weather-related events than conflict or violence. The trends tell us people are being forcibly displaced, forced to migrate and wherever possible, migrating to survive.
