Repeal of law a big step forward Climate disasters fuel migration

THE repealing of a law which governed women’s presence in public spaces has been welcomed as a big step forward for women’s rights in Sudan.

The public order laws gave local police extensive powers to arrest any person, particularly targeting women for dancing at parties, vending on the streets and begging.

Many women were arbitrarily arrested, beaten and deprived of their rights to freedom of association and expression under this law.

“The repeal of the public order laws was long overdue,” said Amnesty International’s deputy director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, Seif Magango. Magango said the government must ensure the entire oppressive public order regime was abolished. “This includes repealing the articles dictating women’s dress code, disbanding the public order police and the dedicated courts, and abolishing flogging.” |

EXTREME weather conditions and wildfires drove more than 20 million people a year from their homes over the past decade, a problem set to worsen unless leaders act swiftly to head off surging climate threats, anti-poverty charity Oxfam said yesterday.

Much of the displacement – caused by cyclones, floods and fires – appeared temporary and in some cases due to better efforts to evacuate people ahead of danger, Oxfam researchers said.

But its “sheer scale” was a surprise, said Tim Gore, Oxfam’s climate policy leader, with island nations like Cuba, Dominica and Tuvalu seeing on average close to 5% of their people out of their homes in any given year. “This is the warming world we have long been warning about. Now we’re seeing it play out before our eyes.”

As two weeks of UN climate change negotiations began yesterday in Madrid, Bangladesh Prime Minister

Sheikh Hasina said it was widely accepted that one of the most severe effects of climate change would be on human migration.

“Extreme weather events are already displacing many more people than violent conflicts,” she said on a panel with leaders of vulnerable countries at the talks.

The Oxfam study, released yesterday, examined the numbers of people displaced inside their home countries by climate-fuelled disasters between 2008 and 2018, based on government and international agency data, as well as media reports. Some countries, like war-torn Somalia, were battered by droughts and floods, sometimes in the same year.

That “confluence of disasters” leaves many poor nations – where most of the displacement is occurring – struggling to recover from one crisis before the next hits, said Gore.

“This is extraordinary. This is climate chaos – what it actually looks like.” Seven of the top 10 countries with the highest displacement by proportion of population were developing island states, largely in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the report found.

But around 80% of all people forced from their homes by weather disasters over the past decade were in Asia, where large populations in countries from the Philippines to Sri Lanka live in areas threatened by cyclones or flooding, it said.

Another analysis, released yesterday by aid charity Save the Children, found that extreme weather in eastern and southern Africa this year – including two cyclones that hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi – drove as many people from their homes by June as in all of 2018.

Last year, Oxfam made a rough estimate of the number displaced by extreme weather disasters during the year who were still out of their homes by the end of it, and came up with about 10-20%.

A Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage was created at climate negotiations in 2013 with the aim of aiding poor nations that have produced few of the emissions that drive climate change, but are suffering its strongest effects.

So far, however, the mechanism has produced little concrete help or new money for those countries, beyond backing the use of insurance policies to limit losses, critics say.

Gore said insurance alone could not address the whole problem. “Loss and damage is the next key battleground of the climate talks.”

Recent analysis by the Stockholm Environment Institute, endorsed by nearly 100 civil society groups, estimated new finance of at least $50 billion (R729bn) a year would be needed by 2022 to deal with loss and damage, rising to $300 billion by 2030. |