Johanna Hoffman, a member of our Emerging Fellows program detects the breaking points of the conflicts that may be raised by refugees’ migration due to climate change in her tenth blog post. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the APF or its other members.

When you follow the links between climate change, refugee migration and conflict, North Africa, the Middle East, the US Mexican border, and the Andean regions of South America continually arise. All are likely to be key flashpoint areas for conflict. While they in no way constitute a comprehensive list, they share a few common characteristics, in particular their vulnerability to water scarcity.

In North Africa, climate shifts are creating increasingly arid conditions. As the Sahel grows drier, more subsistence-based communities are forced to leave for urbanized areas in other regions, to destinations that are not always welcoming. Geopolitical instability in Sudan, for example, on the northern edge of the Sahel, has created huge numbers of refugees since its most recent civil war began in 2013, with nearly 2.3 million people fleeing to neighboring countries. Rather than providing active safe haven, many of these nations, from Kenya to Ethiopia, have grown progressively more hostile, with ethnic enmities and resource strains creating mounting tensions.

On the North American continent, the last two decades have seen increasing militarization of the US border with Mexico. Climatic shifts across Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and portions of Mexico have created an increasingly dry corridor, pushing more rural farmers into urban areas, exacerbating political instability and inequality and motivating more humans to migrate north. The governmental upheaval and climatic pressures driving these movements will likely grow. Depending on the warming scenarios and adaptation levels assumed, researchers anticipate that by 2080 up to 6.5 million adults will attempt to emigrate to the United States from Mexico alone, as a result of water scarcity and agricultural declines.

The Middle East has long been both an area of limited water and site of bitter conflict. With climate change bringing increasingly hot and arid conditions to the region, these water issues will only become more severe. Such mounting scarcity will only compound existing instabilities, long-standing enmities and strife into conditions far direr.

While often overlooked in international media, the Andean region of South America is also particularly vulnerable to the interplay of climate change, refugee migration and conflict. This is a region where water security, agricultural production and power generation all rely on glacial cover and snowfall. As climatic patterns change, those conditions are beginning to disappear. According to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, glacial melt has doubled just in the past few years. Refugees fleeing countries reliant on these ecosystems will migrate to neighboring countries, many of which – such as Columbia -- are already experiencing huge refugee crises already. Adding millions more to these mass departures will make tensions across the region spike.

These specific areas are regions that researchers have emphasized as particularly vulnerable for years. Yet the current and continuing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic are broadening the geographic spans about which warning signs are beginning to sound. As a result of the coronavirus and its associated economic, social, environmental and geopolitical devastations, many developing areas of the world are under direct and more long-term threats. From Djibouti to Venezuela, countries across the world are already stressed from poor waste management, pollution, and weakened governmental oversight. All these factors threaten their chances of recovering from the direct and indirect impacts of the virus.

A recent UN report predicts an increasingly dire situation playing out the globe. Nearly half of all jobs in Africa could be lost because of Covid-19. The crisis and its fallout are slated to disproportionately affect developing nations, particularly in Africa, severely impacting education, human rights, basic food security and nutrition – all factors that contribute to stable, healthy populations.

These are the same factors that enable communities and governments to weather the increasingly stressful conditions that climate instability brings. Without them now, these countries will be left weaker and their populations more vulnerable to the conflicts that will soon arise, creating larger numbers of refugees, greater degrees of forced migration and augmenting the likeliness of ensuing conflict in the spaces towards which they flee.

To navigate these shifts in humane, equitable ways, mediating factors like economic opportunity, infrastructural investment, access to health services and legal protections must be investigated and supported. Doing so demands an essential shift in our understanding of why migration occurs. Rather than viewing climate refugees as direct threats, we can promote a different take, one where those forced to move are seen as proactively adapting to stressful and dangerous environmental change, and the conflicts that arise as a result.

© Johanna Hoffman 2020