A recent Al Jazeera article claims climate change is increasingly responsible for refugee crises around the globe, due to weather-related disasters like flooding and drought, and related food shortages. This is false. Global weather is not getting more volatile. Regardless of climate change, crop production and food availability waxes and wanes, especially in regions with political strife and war.
The article, “Climate change displacement: ‘One of the defining challenges’,” claims that weather patterns are becoming more volatile, so “the prospect of climate-induced migration is increasingly becoming a core issue.” The author cites a United Nations article that says extreme weather like “heavy rainfall and droughts” have caused “an average of more than 20 million people to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries each year.”
The UN report itself actually speaks more broadly, listing “[h]azards resulting from the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as abnormally heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, desertification, environmental degradation, or sea-level rise and cyclones[.]”
While it may be true that 20 million people, or about 0.2% of all people on the planet, per year may need to leave their homes due to some kind of weather-related disaster or environmental degradation, this does not mean that climate change is responsible. Weather, seasonally, annually, and over the course of decades, has throughout the Earth’s history impacted crop production and peoples’ living conditions.
Extreme weather events have not been more frequent or intense, as discussed many times in various Climate Realism articles, including flooding and prolonged droughts. With such a large sample region as the entire planet, there will always be some kind of extreme weather event to point to, but this is not proof of increasing volatility.
Al Jazeera specifies that climate-induced migration is “a movement pattern caused by the effects of climate-related disasters, including droughts leading to a food and farming crisis.”
Examples used are western and central Africa, “which suffer from frequent flooding,” but what the article neglects to mention is that these regions historically have swings between extended drought and long periods of heavy rains that bring flooding, like in Ghana, but despite these extremes food production has continued to rise in the region.
The places that are seeing the worst food shortages are ones where war, government corruption, and ongoing extreme poverty are already impacting a country. Bad weather exacerbates these pre-existing troubles. It’s not uncommon for media and the United Nations to try to shift blame from war and corruption to climate change. The Climate Realism post, “NPR Wrongly Blames Climate Change for Suffering Caused by Civil War, Corruption, and Weather,” refutes this argument made for famously unstable countries like South Sudan and Somalia.
From Guatemala to Syria and beyond, war, poverty, and corrupt or authoritarian governments are repeatedly responsible for mass migration. There is no data showing climate change is a factor. Outside of climate-focused reporting, the United Nations will admit that human violence and conflict is the primary cause of famine.
Towards the end of the Al Jazeera article, some of the experts interviewed for the story admit as much. For instance, one United Nations spokesperson interviewed, Eujin Byun, admitted that western and central Africa deal with “continuing conflict,” which is pushing people to flee for safer places to live. Sanjula Weerasinghe, coordinator of migration and displacement at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), told Al Jazeera that only some of the migration can be said to be even related to climate, “but some of it may be related to the governance around where they live. Some of it relates to their livelihoods, which may be impacted by climate, but preexisting conditions and how they were able to or unable to earn an income[.]” In other words, poverty and poor economic conditions are fundamental factors driving mass international emigration. Weerasinghe also cautioned Al Jazeera that “[t]o just highlight the climate as the key reason why is not entirely accurate.”
This is true. In fact, the evidence showing that extreme weather events are not increasing in frequency or intensity suggests that climate change might not be playing an identifiable role at all in the forced migration problem. In addition, focusing on the issue of climate change above other humanitarian concerns won’t help the people most impacted. Preventing underdeveloped countries from investing in affordable, reliable fossil fuel energy infrastructure will only continue the extreme poverty there, preventing these places from being able to reduce their vulnerability to the impact of extreme weather events.
Al Jazeera and the United Nations should not be trying to find ways to blame the modest warming of the past hundred-plus years for problems that are directly associated with government corruption, lack of secure property rights, war, and underdevelopment. Rather, they should encourage the kind of development that climate obsessed activists oppose, so that people in the most vulnerable countries and regions become wealthier and develop the institutions and infrastructure allowing them to flourish regardless of the weather. People in the United States, Europe, and Japan, for example, don’t migrate to new countries en masse when extreme weather strikes, rather they anticipate, recover, rebuild, and evolve laws and institutions to minimize the harmful impact of the future extreme weather events.
