How Climate Change Complicates the Refugee Crisis

A Syrian refugee camp in Turkey in 2016. Observers suggested that severe drought and extreme heat damaged agricultural land, displacing nearly 2 million people and exacerbating civil conflict in the country. Photo: European Union 2016-European Parliament via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Issue Backgrounder: How Climate Change Complicates the Refugee Crisis

By Joseph A. Davis

“The climate refugee crisis is here,” blared a Washington Post headline earlier this year, prompted by this year’s severe and extensive flooding in southern Brazil. Hundreds of thousands of people there were displaced. Many will never return.

It’s true, the climate refugee crisis is here. But it’s also true that climate refugees have been with us, migrating for thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of years. In the coming decades, you can just expect more environmental journalists to be writing about it.

Just 20 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, more than a million people were displaced. Many of them left New Orleans, which was extensively flooded after levee failures. Subsequent census data suggests that 219,563 people never returned to Louisiana.

Nearly a century before, in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as many as 500,000 Americans abandoned farms on the High Plains and migrated West, typically to California, where some could get agricultural jobs.

And millennia ago, the Indus Valley Civilization flourished in parts of Pakistan and India. Today it is gone — except as an archaeological site. Scientists believe its demise was hastened by climate change.

 

The reasons why people migrate

are many and complex. Climate is

often just a part of the motivation.

 

But historically, the reasons why people migrate are many and complex. Climate is often just a part of the motivation.

For example, ethnic and military conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia has displaced people and spilled over into adjacent nations — several times since the 1980s.

The refugees face starvation because the arid region is racked by multiyear droughts and crop failures worsened by climate change. In such cases, hunger and displacement can become a weapon of war.

 

Pastoralism never stopped

We like to think that what we call “civilization” began during the era when agriculture began replacing the hunter-gatherer and herding cultures of our human ancestors.

This “agricultural revolution” happened progressively beginning around 12,000 years ago. People started living in cities. Geologists call this era the Holocene, pegging it to the end of the last ice age.

But the herding lifestyle never completely disappeared. We still see it today in parts of the world not suited to agriculture: for example, Sami reindeer herders in Finland or the Tuareg culture in Northwest Africa.

Many pastoralists migrate often, responding to the availability of forage and changing weather and climate. But a big problem comes when herders (for climate or another reason) lose their herds and grazing lands and must migrate to cities to survive. Hardship often results.

 

Don’t say ‘refugee’?

The problem of climate refugees is made worse because some experts and authorities discourage the use of the term “refugees” to refer to global heating victims. This makes it harder to see and address, much less solve, the misery of climate refugees.

 

The world has a huge legal and

administrative structure for

handling refugees, which is

why the term is problematic.

 

The world has a huge legal and administrative structure for handling refugees, which is why the term is problematic. The key treaty is the 1951 Refugee Convention, which has been amended by subsequent protocols.

More than 140 nations have signed it; the U.S. ratified it in part in 1968. Much of the work done under the Refugee Convention is done by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The legal structure is complex. But the key takeaway is that for signatories the convention is binding as law. If a refugee (as defined by the treaty) shows up, nations are legally required to take them in. That goes for the tens of thousands of people crossing the U.S. southern border.

Suddenly, just who is a “refugee” takes on serious legal importance.

 

What is not in the definition matters

The UNHCR answers the question in a clear, simple way:

“Refugees are people forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country. They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder.”

That definition does not include some important things, such as hunger, joblessness or the search for economic betterment.

It also does not include flooding, drought or other natural disaster. And it does not include climate change.

Typically there may be multiple causes for migration, such as the combination of war and hunger. Among those who arrive at (and cross) the U.S. southern border, a certain fraction actually is migrating because of drought, floods or crop failure related to climate change. That may include people from Honduras, Nicaragua and other Central and South American nations.

Moreover, many people forced from their homes by climate disasters don’t actually cross the borders of their countries. They simply move to some other place in their country. They are what is called, in favored terminology, “internally displaced persons.”

 

The conflict-climate connection

Are refugees fleeing war or climate change? Sometimes it may actually be climate change that leads to armed conflict. We heard that suggestion about the war in Syria.

ReliefWeb, a U.N. humanitarian offshoot, has said: “Dramatic decreases in precipitation in tandem with increasingly hot temperatures resulted in decimation of agricultural lands and desertification and a massive displacement of nearly 2 million people from rural to urban locales. Such environmental conditions brought on by climate change have exacerbated the civil conflict and economic instability in Syria as we know it today.” Many more were (and remain) displaced by the war itself.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has described the Darfur conflict of a decade ago as a climate change conflict.

 

Legal and definitional limits

don’t mean the mounting

climate refugee crisis

is not a problem.

 

Either way, legal and definitional limits don’t mean the mounting climate refugee crisis is not a problem, or that the displaced people are any less injured and traumatized.

In fact, even the UNHCR is concerned. Andrew Harper, special adviser to UNHCR on climate action, visited the catastrophically flooded region in southern Brazil to observe and work on delivering aid.

"It was underwater for almost 40 days. There wasn't even any rats running around. Everything had died," Harper told Reuters, adding: "It's a warning signal, but we've been seeing warning signals now for five, ten years. At what point do you basically have to slap somebody in the face and say, 'Wake up, you're not going to ignore this.'"

 

How will nations respond?

The migrations, then, have already begun. A big question to be answered in the coming years is what the world will do about it.

Almost as soon as President Biden was sworn in in 2021, he issued an executive order urging federal agencies to address climate migration — along with other migration issues. The intention was good, but his administration soon learned how complex the issues were.

That order produced a report in October 2021. Its recommendations were underwhelming, emphasizing things like study and coordination, rather than direct action — or changes in law and treaties.

Altering the definition of “refugee” under the Refugee Convention would be only a small and partial solution. Stricken people will migrate regardless of the definition.

And the politics of refugee response have changed. As wars racked the Middle East and Africa in recent decades, millions of people sought refuge elsewhere. And millions were welcomed for years into better-off nations like some in Europe — which needed workers — until there came to be so many refugees in parts of Europe that they were no longer welcome.

We seem also to be witnessing a shift in European politics as well, as evidenced by this year’s French elections. And in the U.S., a serious bipartisan proposal for immigration reform failed in the Senate this year when former President Trump torpedoed it.

The rise of right-wing anti-immigrant governments could make any international effort to change the Refugee Convention difficult.

Even more difficult? Fixing the climate crisis.

[Editor’s Note: For more, read this Backgrounder on how climate migration may exacerbate national security issues. Plus, see related headlines from EJToday.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 9, No. 39. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.