On climate change, not border security
The UN Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration which has created so much trouble over the past few months contains an important new recognition. Among its various declarations, the compact recognizes ‘that societies are undergoing demographic, economic, social and environmental changes’, forbes.com reported.
This is one of the first signs that those within the global network of migration governance are stepping up to the challenge of incorporating those displaced by adverse climate effects, global warming and natural disasters into our understanding of what separates a refugee from a so-called economic migrant.
There is a ‘protection gap’ for people who flee their homes and regions due to environmental factors, as they are excluded from the terms of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. The convention is the basis of the current global asylum regime, and obliges nations to provide asylum to anyone fleeing “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” Environmental drivers of migration are not mentioned.
Climate refugees should not, however, be unfamiliar to any European who has watched the news recently. Among those millions of people who sought refuge from one danger or another during the 2015/2016 migrant crisis are people from such regions as the Sahel (the zone between the Sahara desert and Sub-saharan Africa) which have been rendered practically unliveable by drought and desertification. Often derided as economic migrants, people from the affected areas of such countries as Niger, Chad and Mali are ineligible for the same kinds of protection afforded those fleeing wars or other human-driven persecution. But for many if not most of these people, the imperative to flee is just as much a matter of life and death as if they were escaping war.
“Today in Europe, when our leaders discuss migration they see two things,” said Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). “Either you are what they call a political refugee or you are an economic migrant.”
According to Barbut, European leaders are reluctant to discuss those people fleeing climate change and its effects.
“Are they political refugees? Or economic refugees? Or should we create another denomination for them?”
The term climate refugee presents itself quite neatly, acknowledging as it does both the novel external cause and the recognizable human status. Nonetheless, there is undoubtedly a long way to go before the concept is properly incorporated into global leaders’ thinking about migration. But not having an agreed word for something does not mean that thing does not exist. In the meantime, Europe is seeing the real effect of climate-driven migration. Most notably in the Mediterranean. The EU’S main response to this has been The EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, a fund of over $4.6 billion earmarked (though not yet fully deployed) to “addressing root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa.”
The fund has been criticized for mostly contributing to enhanced border security along transit countries (especially in North Africa) rather than tackling the underlying issues causing migration to Europe. In many areas of Africa, those issues are quite clearly environmental.
Across Africa, land degradation is estimated to account for around $286 billion every year, and around 280 million tons of cereal are lost each year due to degradation. This has dramatic consequences, said Barbut.
“If you look at the Sahel, 80 percent of the people work in agriculture, so it means that if the land is degraded, of course, the yields of agriculture and the incomes will fall. And that translates to a loss of food, job, and income. Imagine what it would be (like) in Europe if suddenly 80 percent of the population lost its income.”
Barbut said it is problems like these that are often missed in the discourse on migration in Europe. In the delineation between those choosing to leave their homes for greater opportunities, and those forced to flee their homes for fear of human-driven persecution, those people whose survival is threatened by climate change are often not counted.
For regions like the Sahel, it’s only going to get worse. The target of the Paris accord was to limit warming to 2°C for the century (a target the world looks likely to overshoot). But for desert regions such as the Sahel, that 2°C global increase would mean a local increase of around 4°C. This is because of factors such as land warming faster than oceans, and feedback effects of heat and degradation. “Niger, for example, has an average temperature of around 33°C/34°C, which means a 2°C global increase would push it to around 37°C/38°C.” Barbut said this situation is already devastating. “It makes it impossible for many people to cope, at least with the way that they cultivate (agriculture) today.”
As a result, many people have left their homes and will continue to leave, in order to seek out survival in another region.
“If you look at the irregular migration coming to Europe today, nearly all of it comes from drylands, nearly all of it.”
(This assertion is based on analysis undertaken internally by the UNCCD.) Barbut said in the face of such a pattern, European policymakers need to ask questions about their current assumptions on ‘economic migration’: “They are not coming from all the parts of Africa; they come from the drylands of Africa. So this is what the crisis is today.”
Unless radical changes are implemented, of one kind or another, these incredible waves of migration will continue. According to a UK Ministry of Defense report, about 135 million people could be forced to leave their homes and regions by 2045 because of land degradation. A full 60 million of those are expected to travel from Sub-saharan Africa, first to North Africa and then on to Europe.
As mentioned above, so far the main solution to this problem has been border security, as well as deals with local governments to limit migration. Barbut said there is another way, one that goes to the root cause of climate migration.
“To restore a hectare of degraded land in Niger, it’s about $200 per hectare,” said Barbut. The average farmer in the Sahel cultivates around three hectares so the land restoration per person would cost under $1000.
“At the same time, a migrant, or a refugee, in a camp in Europe costs around 35€ per day. So look at the figure.”
Land restoration is accomplished through programs such as farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) which promotes plant and tree regrowth of a degraded area. According to the UNCCD, this program has been an enormous success in Niger, where in the space of twenty years, five million hectares of land, and over 200 million trees, have been restored. The UNCCD said up to two and a half million people benefit directly from the improved use of land. Today, at least 24 countries in Africa and Asia use this method.