The study, published in Remote Sensing last month (7 September), says that about 650,000 people and almost 1,000 buildings in the three communities in the Dansoman area of Accra will be vulnerable to permanent flooding by 2100, as the shoreline recedes by more than 200 metres.

The study says natural and industrial sites will be submerged, and buildings made of commonly used sandcrete — building material made of cement and sand — will be destroyed by flooding. This will cause disease outbreaks, population displacements, loss of land and biodiversity, and decreased fishing catch and earnings, it says.

Based on a SimClim — a computer model system for examining the effects of climate variability and change over time and space — it says this scenario is likely to affect negatively the nearby Densu Ramsar wetland zone, a multi-million dollar salt industry, and local fisheries and farms. The study also revealed that local communities have no systems in place to help them adapt to the problem.

Kwasi Appeaning-Addo, the lead author from the University of Ghana, toldSciDev.Net that the study was mainly motivated by a public outcry over perennial high tides. His team wanted to contribute to knowledge about providing sustainable management and development strategies that deal with the problem.

The study could inform policy planning, said Appeaning-Addo. “The time to act is now,” he added.

According to Ghana’s Hydrological Services Department, the ocean claims 1.5 – 2 metres of Ghana’s 539 kilometre coastline annually, with the most risky areas recording four metres.

Kwabena Kankam-Yeboah, the principal research scientist at the Water Research Institute, in Ghana, said that the main way of dealing with surges of the sea predicted in the study is to adhere strictly to land-use policy and scientific engineering.

But he added the model used in the study was designed elsewhere for climatic conditions different from those in Ghana, which raises questions about its applicability.

Carl Fiati, officer in-charge of marine resources and coastlines in the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency, said that, although climate change is real, studies have not yet proved that rising sea levels and high tidal waves experienced in Ghana are caused by rising temperatures and changing climate.

Link to full paper in Remote Sensing.

Source: SciDevNet

Contents include the following:

• A Decision Framework for Environmentally Induced Migration
• Multidimensional Re-creation of Vulnerabilities and Potential for Resilience in International Migration
• The Thin Line Between Choice and Flight: Environment and Migration in Rural Benin
• North-South Migration in Ghana: What Role for the Environment?
• Economic or Environmental Migration? The Push Factors in Niger
• Flooding and Relocation: The Zambezi River Valley in Mozambique
• Western Sahara: Migration, Exile and Environment
• Environmental Degradation and Migration on Hispaniola Island
• Drought Triggered Temporary Migration in an East Indian Village
• Migration and Displacement Triggered by Floods in the Mekong Delta
• Contrasted Views on Environmental Change and Migration: the Case of Tuvaluan Migration to New Zealand

Download each article free here.

Aisha Alim 42, a former Lake Chad farmer, now earns a meager leaving selling fried peanuts in Briketteri after watching his farmland near Lake Chad run out of water.

“It has been a bitter reality to swallow and a battle for survival,” he said. “The desert keeps encroaching on farmland as the water recedes and this makes it difficult for farming activity to thrive. I used to grow onions, peppers and maize but my farming area turned dry and I had no choice except to relocate.”

Mahmadou Bello, 52, who once fished in Lake Chad, similarly brought his wife and six children to Cameroon’s capital two years ago when the lake could no longer provide enough fish.

“We used to make enough money as fishermen by the shores of the lake and my wife was also involved in fish smoking because there was enough catch,” he said. Now, however, he has had to take up work as a butcher to support his family, he said.

Lake Chad, a large shallow freshwater lake that borders Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, has shrunk in size by as much as 90 percent over the last four decades, forcing a growing number of farmers, fishermen and herders who depend on it to seek new livelihoods elsewhere.

A recent study by NASA and the German Aerospace Centre blames climate change – particularly more erratic rainfall – and human activity – including population hikes, overgrazing and overuse of lake water for irrigation – for the gradual disappearance of one of Africa’s biggest lakes.

The study warns that urgent action is needed by members of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), charged with overseeing the water body, to avoid further dramatic shrinking of the lake, which provides water or livelihoods for more than 20 million people in the region.

FEAR OF POTENTIAL CONFLICTS

At the last World Food Security Summit in Rome, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi sounded a warning on the dangers associated with Lake Chad’s decline, saying the loss of water might well spur serious conflict in the region.

“Something has to be done to save Lake Chad from the advancing desert. If it dries up it will be a real danger not only to the basin population but to the entire African continent that depends on the fish and agricultural products from the area,” he argued.

Already there are growing conflicts among herders scrambling for limited pasture and fishermen fighting over declining stocks of fish, as well as confrontations – including some violent clashes – between migrating herders and fishermen and the people already living in the new communities where the migrants settle.

“In Nigeria and Cameroon, cattle herder migrants who move southward end up competing for land resources with host communities. This has led to some of the recent conflicts between herders and farming communities in northeastern Nigeria and the Adamawa region of Cameroon,” a report by the Lake Chad Basin Commission said.

Water shortages are already causing a serious shortage of animal feed in the Lake Chad region, resulting in cattle deaths and plummeting livestock production, the report said.

On the whole, average household income in the region has fallen by more than half in recent years, the study said, and fish catches that hit 140 metric tons a year in the 1960s and 1970s have now fallen to below 80,000 metric tons a year.

Farming – which employs over half of the lake basin’s population – also has been hard hit, producing growing food scarcity, said Abdullam Urmar, executive secretary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission.

Of the 1.6 million hectares that would benefit from irrigation in the lake drainage area, only 115,000 hectares are actually irrigated, largely as a result of falling water levels, he said.

SAVING THE RECEEDING LAKE

Efforts to stem the problems at Lake Chad are complicated by the fact that so many countries are involved.

According to Aboubakari Sarki, Cameroon’s minister of livestock, fisheries and animal husbandry, protecting the lake cannot be the work of a single country.

“This is a decision that has to be taken by the five member countries of the commission – Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. More so, the commission is under the supervision of the United Nations Development Programme (and) that has to be consulted,” he said.

One of the measures put in place by the commission already to try to protect the lake is strict regulation of the use of its water under a standing charter signed in 1994 by the lake’s neighbors and other lake water users in the region, including Algeria, Sudan and Libya.

Other proposals include channeling the water of the Oubangui River in the Central African Republic to Lake Chad, an effort that has yet to find funding.

Patrick Akwa, Cameroon’s secretary general of the Ministry of Environment, said the feasibility study alone for the project would cost more than $50 million.

“The project involves damming the Oubangui River at Palambo in the Central African Republic and channeling some of its water through a navigable canal to Lake Chad,” he said.

Elias Ntungwe Ngalame is an award-winning environmental writer with Cameroon’s Eden Group of newspapers.

Source: Reuters AlertNet

Three of the episodes center around the issue of human mobility as a result of climate change at some depth, often following the lives of those who chose to abandon their farming livelihoods and move to nearby mega cities in search of a better life.

I have embedded the first episode “Bursting at the Seams”, which examines Lagos – one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The other two are “Water, water, everywhere…” which explores the capital city of Dhaka in Bangladesh, and “Feed the World” which follows migrants from their drought stricken villages to the city of Dakar in Senegal. Each episode is about 45 minutes long. Click here to check out the other episodes in the series.

Source: BBC World News/rockhopper.tv

The Kampala Convention, a ground-breaking treaty adopted by the African Union (AU), promises to protect and assist millions of Africans displaced within their own countries. Significantly, the treaty recognized natural disasters as well as conflict and generalized violence as key factors in uprooting people.

Jean Ping, chairperson of the Commission of the African Union, told IRIN that “more and more people are likely to be displaced” as Africa experiences more frequent droughts and floods brought about by climate change.

He said the inclusion of displacement by natural disasters was informed by the global debate on the need to develop a framework for the rights of “climate refugees” – people uprooted from their homes and crossing international borders – because the changing climate threatened their survival.

The treaty also calls on governments to set up laws and find solutions to prevent displacement caused by natural disasters, with compensation for those who were displaced. Migration expert Etienne Piguet said with the Kampala Convention the AU had “once again” tried to push the envelope.

In 1969 the Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, adopted by the then Organization of African Unity, had gone a step further than the 1951 UN Refugee Convention by using a definition of “refugee” that included not only people fleeing persecution but also those fleeing war or events seriously disturbing public order.

Piguet described the reference to people displaced by natural disasters as an “interesting attempt” to find “adequate answers to the new concern about migration linked to environmental degradation”.

In 2008 climate-related natural disasters like droughts, hurricanes and floods forced 20 million people out of their homes, while 4.6 million people were internally displaced by conflicts, according to a recent joint study by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

The Representative of the UN Secretary-General (RSG) on the Human Rights of the Internally Displaced Persons in a submission to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change noted that people uprooted from their homes by natural disasters enjoyed protection under the existing human rights law and the guiding principles on internal displacement.

However, the Kampala Convention also calls on governments to “prevent or mitigate, prohibit and eliminate root causes” of displacement, and find “durable solutions” to them.

Moussa Idriss Ndele, President of the Pan-African Parliament, the legislative body of the AU, said the debate in Kampala on the rights of people displaced by natural disasters did not “quite evolve properly – we did not address the issue of climate change” because most people still believed conflict was the biggest trigger of displacement.

Can of worms

However, it was unclear which events could be linked to climate change. “More and more people are being displaced by floods, which are becoming more and more frequent and intense,” said Rachel Shebesh, chair of the African Parliamentarian Initiative for Climate Risk Reduction.

The RSG said there was a need to clarify or even develop a legal framework to help people who moved inside or outside the country because environmental degradation and slow-onset disasters – like desertification, salination of soil and groundwater – made areas uninhabitable, and if displaced persons could not return to their homes they should be considered forcibly displaced.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected more frequent and intense floods and droughts in Africa during the next few decades, and the debate is not only set to continue, but to intensify.

Source: IRIN

The Emblem of the AU

The African Union (AU), which is an intergovernmental organization consisting of 52 African states, held the Special Summit for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa this week. It took place in Kampala, Uganda and concluded yesterday, running from October 19 to October 23. The theme of the summit was “Addressing the Challenge of Forced Displacement in Africa”.

The summit was a success and out of it came the adoption of the groundbreaking Convention on Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons in Africa. The Convention is the first continent-wide instrument to address the specific plight of internally displaced people. It integrates the main aspects of international humanitarian law and will oblige AU states for the first time to prevent internal displacement, come up with solutions to the causes of displacement, and provide internally displaced people with basic rights. People forced to flee will find in the Convention the full range of rights they should be entitled to – before, during and after displacement. For the Convention to enter into force, at least 15 AU member states would have to ratify it.

The Convention is also the first of its kind in many ways with regards to legitimizing increasing environmental migration and displacement. It is a legally binding regional treaty that recognizes the multiple causes of internal displacement, including natural disasters and climate change as drivers of this phenomenon. In 2008, there were 104 internationally reported natural disasters, 99 percent of which were climate related. Moreover, the number of people in Africa affected by natural disasters has doubled over the last 20 years, from 9 million in 1989 to nearly 17 million in 2008.

The actual entry relating to climate change displacement in the Convention can be found Article 5: “Obligations of States Parties relating to Protection and Assistance”, Section 4, and states:

“States Parties shall take measures to protect and assist persons who have been internally displaced due to natural or human made disasters, including climate change.”

United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes was in attendance. “In reality, displacement prompted by natural disasters and climate change, and the resultant food and water shortages, promise to be one of the greatest – if not the greatest – challenge many countries will face in the years ahead,” stressed Mr. Holmes in a speech during the summit. “Many of you here today already know all too well from recent painful experiences how climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme natural-hazard events, particularly floods, storms and droughts,” he added.

The recognition of climate change as a driver of displacement in this AU instrument sends a signal to the rest of the international community, including the United Nations, about the seriousness with which Africa, home to around half of the global total of internally displaced persons, considers this issue.

Several African nations adopted a document on the rights of the continent’s 17 million internally-displaced persons (IDP), refugees and returnees.

“The important thing about this convention is that it applies to conflict and climate as causes of displacement,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told reporters shortly after the signing.

“I am confident about the awareness of how seriously African countries will be affected by climate change,” he said.

In 2008, there were 104 recognised natural disasters in Africa and 99 percent were climate related, John Holmes, United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said at the Kampala Summit.

According to Holmes, a recorded 700,000 people on the continent were displaced by climate events in 2008, but he said he suspects the real number is much higher.

“I have been struck by the number of people, ministers of African countries who have told me how their lives are changing, the lives of their people is changing because the climate change,” he said.

He argued the best way to limit the number of people displaced by climate events is to plan before the disaster occurs, by improving water management systems and emphasising the importance of drought resistant crops.

“What we fear is, what the scientists predict, is that this is simply going to get worse,” he added.

“There is a problem here that we need to deal with because the problems that occur to people who are displaced by conflict also occur when people are displaced by natural disasters. They have the same problem of homelessness.”

Tarsis Kabwegyere, Ugandan minister for Refugees and Disaster Preparedness, told AFP that people displaced by climate events were previously given less consideration.

“In Uganda it is already a serious matter. We are having very strange winds, landslides in areas where we didn’t have them in my own lifetime. And now we are more concerned with dealing with that aspect of displacement,” he said.

Source: AFP

Ciara Sutton is a multimedia broadcast journalist who worked on climate change migration issues in Kenya earlier this year as part of a project for her MA in International Journalism. The project is supported by interviews with international climate change professionals and representatives on the ground from the Red Cross. She authors her own blog “Climate Change and Human Migration in Kenya” where she documented her journey, examines the lives of migrants, and posts related stories.

Below is a recent video from her website which highlights the issue of climate-induced rural to urban migration in Kenya:

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Source: Climate Change and Human Migration in Kenya

Related Links:
» Devastating East Africa Droughts Caused by Volatile Climate – VOA News – (Sep, 2009)
» A new (under) class of travellers – The Economist (Jun, 2009)
» Climate Change and Migration in Nairobi – UNHABITAT & Columbia University (Jun, 2009)

Photo credit: DanChurchAid

The movements of peoples around the world due to climate change affects all of those involved but none is more susceptible to the problems created by climate change migration than children. Current trends show climate change is impacting the developing world much more directly than upon the developed world. Furthermore, 85% of the estimated 2.2 billion children in the world live in the developing world leaving children at greater risk for diseases, exploitation and the psychological impacts that is sure to affect generations to come.

UNICEF’s report entitled, “Climate Change and Children: A Human Security Challenge” outlines these risks including the “increasingly convincing body of evidence that many of the main killers of children (malaria, diarrhoea and undernutrition) are highly sensitive to climatic conditions”. According to a paper by the International Institute for Environment and Development, a decrease in water supply, increased desertification, and rising sea levels among others all mean a rise in forced migration thus “more malnutrition, more disease, more death and injury, more risk of neglect, abuse and exploitation” have all been documented outcomes in youth populations.

The story of Petro, a street child in Malawi highlights this risk. Because of a number of bad harvest seasons in his rural village, his parents had no way to feed him. His father eventually found a job on a plantation far from their village and Petro was left to fend for himself. Ultimately Petro found himself begging on the streets of Blantyre, Malawi’s biggest city. The catalyst for Petro’s move was the drought causing the bad harvest which ultimately caused a breakdown in his family and eventual move to an urban area.

To better understand why a family breakdown could occur so seemingly with ease, it is imperative to understand the role of a child within many developing countries and how the Convention on the Rights of the Child plays a definitive part in changing that role. This, coupled with the need to raise awareness of a new kind of forced migration caused by climate change to hopefully garner greater protection for children set forth in the Convention on the Rights of the Child are vital to ending stories like Petro’s.