Climate Change Is Upon Us: The Refugees Are Coming

 This Brookings Institute Report contains the following warning. 

“In 2018, the World Bank estimated that three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia) will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050.” 

The nations of the world seem to recognize this as an inevitability, but the immensity of the problem leaves them speechless—literally. 

“While climate migrants who flee unbearable conditions resemble refugees, the legal protections afforded to refugees do not extend to them. In the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations established a system to protect civilians who had been forced from their home countries by political violence. Today, there are almost 20.4 million officially designated refugees under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)—however, there is an additional group of 21.5 million people who flee their homes as a result of sudden onset weather hazards every year.” 

“The UNHCR has thus far refused to grant these people refugee status, instead designating them as ‘environmental migrants,’ in large part because it lacks the resources to address their needs. But with no organized effort to supervise the migrant population, these desperate individuals go where they can, not necessarily where they should. As their numbers grow, it will become increasingly difficult for the international community to ignore this challenge. As severe climate change displaces more people, the international community may be forced to either redefine “refugees” to include climate migrants or create a new legal category and accompanying institutional framework to protect climate migrants. However, opening that debate in the current political context would be fraught with difficulty. Currently, the nationalist, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic atmosphere in Europe and the U.S. would most likely lead to limiting refugee protections rather than expanding them.” 

Of particular interest for the United States is the effect of climate change in Central America.  There is a region known as the “Northern Triangle” consisting of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.  People wishing to cross the southern border were once mostly economic immigrants looking for work and a better life.  There is a simple solution in that case: support better economic conditions in Mexico.  Now the border is seeing immense numbers of people fleeing the Northern Triangle countries because they believe they have no other option.  Much of the population in these regions have supported themselves by raising crops.  When they are no longer able to do so they must migrate internally or externally.  Their home countries have not been able to respond effectively, leaving the only option for many to head north towards the wealthy United States. 

This source provides some background.

“While powerful hurricanes are bringing strong winds and punishing rainfall to Central America’s Caribbean coastline, an ecological region that runs along its Pacific coast is experiencing more and more drought as climbing global temperatures continue to change precipitation patterns.”

“The Dry Corridor runs from southern Mexico through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. This region earned its name long ago, but in the last few decades, the droughts have become longer and more severe. And when the rain does come, it’s heavier than ever, but runs right off of the hard, parched soil – creating a vicious cycle of extremes that threaten the physical, financial, and mental well-being of the people who live there.”

An article by Michael McDonald for Bloomberg Businessweek, Climate Change Has Central Americans Fleeing to the U.S., provides information about the current situation at the US border.

“The so-called Northern Triangle is plagued by chronic violence, corrupt governments, and a lack of economic opportunities—factors that send a more than 300,000 El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans fleeing their countries each year, according to estimates by academics at the University of Texas at Austin. Farmers, who in some of these nations make up as much as 30% of the population, are battling another menace: extreme weather.”

“Residents of the Northern Triangle have endured five drought years over the past decade. In 2018 alone, a dry spell caused crop losses for at least 2.2 million people, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Most of them were subsistence farmers with no crop insurance who were growing corn and beans. Last year’s Hurricanes Eta and Iota destroyed homes, crops, and roads, affecting 8 million people across Central America. Additionally, infections such as leaf rust, exacerbated by climate change, are increasingly killing coffee crops, one of the region’s top exports.”

“’These consecutive years of extreme drought are really driving poverty and food insecurity in the region and pushing families to abandon agriculture and to migrate to survive,’ says Marie-Soleil Turmel, a soil scientist with Catholic Relief Services, which works with farmers in the area. ‘Whole communities are being wiped out’.”

“The devastation has left millions in need of food assistance. In Honduras, 31% of the population is experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity, as is 23% in Guatemala and 10% in El Salvador, according to the UN’s global report on food crises.” 

“Since the start of the year, U.S. authorities have apprehended or denied entry to more than 200,000 Central Americans at the southern U.S. border, expelling many of them to Mexico.” 

The government’s longer-term response to the border situation is to try to eliminate the conditions that motivate people to leave.  That sounds eerily like that task we every few years swear never to try again: nation building. 

“The Biden administration has pledged $4 billion over four years to help tackle the root causes of migration from Central America, including the climate crisis. In April, Vice President Kamala Harris also announced $310 million in humanitarian assistance for the countries in the region. ‘One of the areas of focus for us is the issue of hunger, hurricanes, pandemic and what these acute factors have caused in terms of the reason for the migration that we are seeing,’ said Harris during a state visit to Guatemala yesterday. ‘They are leaving not because they want to but because they have no resources’.”

Is a billion dollars a year sufficient to turn around three troubled nations?  Climate issues are going to get worse not better.  What will that entail?  The US must assume responsibility because it has the most resources, and it believes it has the most to lose if it doesn’t quench the flow.  But is it really its problem—or is it the world’s?  

What we have been referring to as climate refugees are not people fleeing the weather, they are people who are unable to feed themselves because the climate has changed.  It may be that US investment in the countries involved could alleviate the food insecurity issues and stem the migrant tide—for a while.  We should take this border situation as a lesson and a warning.  On the path we are fallowing, temperature rise will continue and our ability to produce food will decline.  This conclusion was discussed in Growing Food in a Warming Climate.  Meanwhile the planet’s population continues to increase.  There is no easy solution.  Everything that can be done must be done to limit temperature increase.  Hundreds of millions of hungry people can turn the world into a dangerous and ugly place.