Africa has seen some extremes in climate disasters – the
flooding last year contrasted with the recent droughts. In 2012, I visited Kenya and wrote about the impacts of climate change on the Maasai. At a side event on Climate Migrants this
week, one of the African delegates in the audience talked about the strong ties
Africans have to the land. He noted that “no young person wants to leave their
ancestral land, but they are having no choice.
Young people are trying to cross the Sahara on foot – to get
to Europe. “
The IPCC report of 1990 acknowledged
that migration might be the greatest single consequence of climate change, and
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that
“by 2050, between 250 million and one billion people might be forced to move
due to climate change.” Ziaul Haque
Mukta, Regional Policy Coordinator from Oxfam Asia, gave the keynote talk,
starting by highlighting recent forced migration events: Philippines (Typhoon
Haiyan: 600,000 evacuated, over 10 million people affected); Papua New Guinea
(Carteret Islands: 1000 permanently relocated due to storm erosion and salt
water intrusion); India (Lohachara Island: 10,000 evacuated due to island being
entirely submerged); Bangladesh (Bhola Island, 500,000 homeless due to half of
island being submerged). In the United
States, Hurricane Katrina temporarily displaced over a million people in 2005.
Currently, migration is part of the Loss
and Damage discussion, but the panel urged that Climate Forced Migration should
be treated as a stand alone issue with its own legal framework. They called on the developed countries to “own
up to their historic responsibility,” referring to historic greenhouse gas emissions. They continued: “We can
no longer wait. … Justice demands that,
and they have to be fair to all.“
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