Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Millions in S Asia may be forced to migrate by 2050
NEW DELHI: At least 62 million South Asian people may have to migrate from their homes due to slow onset of climate disasters such as rising sea-level, water stress, crop yield reductions, ecosystem loss, and drought by 2050, according to a new report by Climate Action Network South Asia and Action Aid International.
In India, an estimated 14 million people may have already migrated this year due to slow onset climate change events, according to the report. This number is expected to more than treble if current nationally determined contributions are not enhanced and the world heads for 3.2 degree C warming over pre-industrial levels.
According to a recent study by United Nations Environment Programme, India is one of the countries that will meet its nationally determined contribution (NDCs) under the Paris accord that aims to keep warming to under 2 degree C over preindustrial levels. India’s NDCs are also 2 degree C target compatible, according to Climate Action Tracker. Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia are the other nations that are also 2 degree C compatible.
The research was undertaken by Bryan Jones, one of the authors of the World Bank’s Groundswell Report on internal climate migration in 2018. He used a model that projects future changes in the spatial distribution of the population, from which estimates of climate change led migration are drawn.
These numbers do not include migration caused by extreme weather events such as flooding and the report also assumes that countries will start taking action towards meeting their pledges and targets under the Paris Agreement.
Some examples of sudden climate disasters that have led to large scale migration in the recent past include cyclone Sidr in 2007 that caused damage estimated at $ 1.5 billion in Bangladesh; Amphan earlier this year, which caused losses worth $ 13 billion and took 118 lives in West Bengal, India; Bulbul , again in West Bengal last year that damaged crops across almost 1.5 million hectares of land, triggered fishery damage worth $100 million, and killed 13, 286 livestock.
In India, around 60% of agriculture is rain-fed. The region’s rural communities are thus highly sensitive to crop-destroying climatic shocks and 99.3% of south Asia’s agricultural workers are informal labour, which makes them even more vulnerable.
“Slow-onset climate impacts could cause countries in South Asia to lose nearly 2% of their GDP by 2050, rising to a loss of nearly 9% by 2100, without counting for the losses due to extreme weather events,” the report, released on Friday, has said. Some climate hot spots, including the Sundarbans and the Mahanadi delta will experience displacement due to uninhabitable rising temperatures, eroding rivers and rising seas .
In its study of migration patterns, the report found that the poor in south Asia often sell their belongings and take loans at predatory interest rates to fund their move. Such movement often takes people to urban areas nearby and then to megacities where they are forced to take up unskilled jobs that pay little. Most of the internal movement within South Asia is considered seasonal or circular migration, where some members of families migrate for a period of the year to another rural area or urban centre.
“Political failure to limit global warming to below 2 degree C, as per the Paris agreement goal, is already driving 18 million climate migrants from their homes in 2020. New analysis, released today, estimates climate migration will treble in South Asia alone, a region badly affected by climate disasters including floods, droughts, typhoons and cyclones,” a statement by CANSA said.
Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at ActionAid, said that the migration patterns that emerged from the 2011 census in India have been used to model impacts of climate change on movement of people for the report. “The Indian government hasn’t woken up to the reality of climate change yet. It doesn’t know how badly people and livelihoods are going to be impacted. We need to take various climate scenarios into account...”
“This study is important because it has quantified something we have known all along, that climate change is displacing people in large numbers. It has brought to the fore the issue of climate justice and puts the onus of climate change on the global north. There is no money committed for people impacted by loss and the damage associated with climate change. It needs to be delivered,” said Samrat Sengupta, programme director, climate change, at the Centre for Science and Environment.