Climate Change on the Move

Jordan Erdos — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:36:12 +0000

A few years ago, I was fortunate to catch Sebastião Salgado’s exhibition Migrations, a photodocumentary survey of human population movement. Many of the photos showed strong but desperate people far from home and clueless to what the future might hold for them. Salgado captured the indominable human spirit, but also the pathos of the journey migrants face when they leave — most likely are forced to leave — their native lands.In addition to the difficulty migrants face when they are uprooted from their homes, there is the added complication of the effect of thousands of people settling in a new country or region. Already pressed for resources, areas receiving the migrants are hard-pressed to find solutions to the sudden increase in population. Once sustainable economic models may rapidly be found to be untenable with the changing circumstances.The International Organization for Migration, a Swiss intergovernmental organization established in 1951, has just released a policy brief Migration, Climate Change and the Environment, which documents the effect migration is having and is expected to have on the environment. The report states that global climate change is having a clear effect on migration as vital resources diminish and human populations are forced to seek them elsewhere. A widely-cited study indicates up to 200 million people could be on the move due to environmental factors by 2050.What will be the result of all of this movement? Will resource-rich areas be able to absorb the migrating populations with minimal difficulty or will the sudden inflow of environmental refugees overwhelm the resource-rich areas, leading to a potential prolonged struggle for access to those resources by heterogeneous populations?We must transform how people think about the environment and environmentalism. We are no longer looking solely at questions of local conservation, endangered species, or human health. Global climate change is altering the very foundations of human societies and resource management. It is imperative we continue to address the human-related causes of global climate change and raise awareness of its drastic effects upon the whole of humanity.

Rainforest Partnership » International Organization for Migration

Climate Change on the Move