The 25-year-old woman is one of thousands of native people who migrate every year from the municipality of Tlapa and its surroundings in the southern state of Guerrero, to pick fruit and vegetables in the north of the country.

Tlapa, one of the poorest places in Mexico, is ravaged by deforestation, intermittent drought and torrential rains, so that farming is not an economically viable occupation for local people.

Regions like Tlapa illustrate the possible relationship between climate change and migration, an issue that is coming under scrutiny in Mexico, a country that is vulnerable to the effects of phenomena like prolonged droughts, soil degradation, devastating rainstorms, lack of water and rising sea levels.

“Migration patterns are changing as a result of climate change which is having increasing impacts. In a number of states, more people are emigrating,” Andrea Cerami, a lawyer with the independent Mexican Centre for Environmental Law (CEMDA), told IPS.

Together with factors like poverty, lack of job opportunities and high crime rates, environmental degradation has become an additional element driving migration, both within the country and abroad.

Every year some 500,000 people emigrate from Mexico to the United States, where some eight million Mexicans are living without the necessary legal documents, according to specialist agencies.

The National Institute for Statistics and Geography reports that the areas receiving the largest numbers of internal migrants are Mexico City, the western state of Jalisco, Baja California on the border with the United States, and the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, while the centre, south and mid-west of the country are the major sources of migrants.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines environmental migrants as “persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad.”

“Climate change isn’t necessarily people’s main reason for leaving,” Patricia Romero Lankao of the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told IPS. “They leave in search of job opportunities that are not available in their places of origin, and because they have a network of contacts. Climate change is still not the chief reason, but it does play a part.”

Romero Lankao and her colleagues Hua Qin and Melissa Haeffner are working on a research project titled “Displacement or Adaptation? Climate Change and Migration in Mexico”, presented in June at an international conference in Oslo on Climate Change and Displacement in the 21st Century.

In 2010 and the first half of 2011, Mexico as a whole suffered intense drought, while in the south and southeast torrential rains and flooding destroyed crops, human settlements and infrastructure.

Four powerful hurricanes have struck the country since 2005, leaving 650,000 Mexicans homeless, while floods displaced 500,000 people between 2003 and 2010, according to the NCAR research project.

Several recent research studies appear to have identified a link between climate phenomena and the movement of people in Mexico.

In their study presented this year, “The Environmental Dimensions of Emigration from Rural Mexico”, Lori Hunter, Sheena Murray and Fernando Riosmena of the University of Colorado at Boulder found that “households subjected to drought conditions are far more likely to send a migrant as compared to those subjected to wet conditions.”

The scientists examined data collected between 1987 and 2005 from 24,132 households comprising a total of 117,040 people, from 66 rural communities in 12 different states.

They found substantial variation in rainfall patterns, with approximately 23 percent of the sample subjected to drought in the year of the survey.

Moreover, 13 percent of the sample suffered drought the year before the survey, and 3.6 percent were subject to drought in both the previous and the survey years.

Close to 28 percent experienced heavy rainfall in the survey year, while 23 percent had suffered a deluge in the previous year, and seven percent in both.

Meanwhile Shuaizhang Feng, Alan Krueger and Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University in the U.S. state of New Jersey concluded that a 10 percent reduction in crop yields in Mexico leads an additional two percent of the population to emigrate. By approximately the year 2080, they estimated climate change would induce 1.4 to 6.7 million Mexicans to emigrate to the United States, because of declines in agricultural productivity.

Their research paper “Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico-U.S. cross-border migration” was published in 2010 in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

By 2050 there could be a worldwide total of 200 million people who have migrated for environmental reasons, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that reviews evidence related to global warming.

The categories of “environmental migrant” or “climate change refugee” are not included in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, nor in the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees.

“Because measures to adapt to climate change have not been adopted by the Mexican state, people in this country who are adversely affected will have to move away and migrate, primarily to the United States,” CEMDA’s Cerami predicted.

“Mexico will be a very important laboratory. The empirical evidence we have reviewed tells us that, droughts and all, what causes farmers to leave their homes is markets and opportunities,” said Romero Lankao, whose work at NCAR uses a model that links the vulnerability of communities, capital, and life opportunities with migration. “Circular migration, where people eventually return to their communities, is more interesting, and deserves more research,” she said.

“We have to migrate, because there is no food, and no money,” said Santiago, who first became a migrant when she was seven years old and is now the mother of a four-year-old son. Her own mother was run over in mid-August on a road in the northern state of Chihuahua during the chili pepper harvest. (END)

“The situation has now got really severe; we are talking about desert, rather than farming land,” said Abdel Qader Abu Awad, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). “People cannot live in this environment any more and their final coping mechanism is migration.”

Syria‘s drought is now in its second year, affecting farming regions in the north and east of the country, especially the northeastern governorate of Hassakeh. Wheat production is just 55 percent of its usual output and barley is seriously affected, according to the UN’s drought response plan, drawn up following two recent multi-agency missions.

Blamed on a combination of climate change, man-made desertification and lack of irrigation, up to 60 percent of Syria‘s land and 1.3 million people (of a population of 22 million) are affected, according to the UN. Just over 800,000 people have lost their entire livelihood, according to the UN and IFRC.

No-one knows exactly how many people have migrated across the country because of the drought. The Syrian Ministry for Agriculture and Agrarian Reform’s estimate in July was 40,000 to 60,000 families, with 35,000 from Hassakeh alone. But with people moving all the time, the figure is likely to be an underestimate.

The UN’s drought response plan found there had been a “dramatic increase in the already substantial migration out of the affected areas”. Migrants head for the cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, according to the report.

“It is very difficult to monitor the scale of migration as it is constantly happening,” said Awad. “When NGOs head to a settlement, there is no guarantee anyone will still be there.”

“Nothing left for us there”

In July, Hassan Hami Hami and his family moved to a suburb of Damascus after he lost his livelihood as a wheat farmer in Qamishle on the northeast border with Turkey, around 650 km from Damascus.

“There is nothing left for us there,” he said. “Farming stopped and I sold plastic for a while, but it was not enough. We had to borrow so much money from people just to survive.”

He said moving was a last resort. “It is not our home but with my son and daughter-in-law working we can just about manage.”

Hassan and his wife, his son and daughter-in-law and their four children now share a small, bare apartment. Between them his son and daughter-in-law earn SYP 9,000 [US$196] a month by working shifts in a local factory. Downstairs and in next-door buildings live other families who have moved because of the drought.

Knock-on effects

The migration is causing knock-on social problems for these families as they have left behind the tight-knit communities they belonged to. Crime rates are on the rise in areas where drought migrants have settled, because of poverty, say locals.

A UN joint mission report in July said more and more children were being sent to work rather than going to school.

“The drought is causing a high drop-out rate,” Sherazade Boualia, the resident representative of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Syria, said. “It is vital that children do not miss out on education. We are trying to give support to people so their children do not need to leave school in order to work. For those who move, we are trying to make sure they enrol in new schools.”

Families left in the area who cannot afford, or do not want, to move are suffering. The UN’s drought response plan lists problems including the drying up of drinking water; and water from unclean sources is threatening to cause disease. Prices are rising as food becomes scarce; people are surviving on bread and sugared tea, said the UN.

Aid designed to stall migration

In August, IFRC gave US$300,340 from its emergency fund to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) to distribute food to the most vulnerable people. The organizations will launch a joint appeal to fund water purification equipment in schools and promote hygiene. The government and UN agencies have distributed food packages and seeds in the past.

Agencies hope the emergency measure can stall further migration. “When you get to the point where you decide to give up and move, things have gone very far,” said Awad. “But many families do not want to leave their homeland and those who have, want to return.”

Aid agencies say a sustainable long-term plan for the affected areas is needed. “We need to do studies to identify a disaster risk reduction strategy on how to overcome climate change and have better farming practices,” said Awad.

“These include planting new trees, good irrigation and legislation to prevent overuse of the land,” he said. “No one will go back if they don’t have a livelihood to go back to.”

Source: IRIN

Related Links:
» Somalia: Pastoralists Leave Drought-Hit Villages – IRIN (Jun 23, 2009)
» 160 Syrian Villages Deserted ‘Due to Climate Change – AFP (Jun 2, 2009)

With less melt water from snow, the dry season is set to begin a month earlier. While disrupting some farming, particularly in the south and east where agriculture is the mainstay of the economy, environmentalists warn it will be urban areas which face the most serious water shortages over the next five years.

Two man-made factors add to Lebanon’s water shortage problems. Half of rainfall is currently lost through run-off, evaporation or ground seepage every year, while much of the plumbing and irrigation systems are still in disarray from the civil war and the 2006 July War.

So, what does this mean for the 400,000 Palestinian refugees that live in the country? (Of Lebanon’s roughly four million people, including around 400,000 Palestinian refugees, over 80 percent live in urban areas, with 1.5 million living in Beirut.) They will be migrants not only due to statelessness and conflict, but also climate change. Where will they go? It appears that no one has an answer.

Photo credit: Cameron Feast/Oxfam

(Oxfam Australia) July 27, 2009 – An Oxfam Australia report published today highlights the urgent need for next week’s Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns to address the dramatic effects of climate change within the region.

The Future is Here: Climate Change in the Pacific finds that Pacific Islanders are already feeling the effects of climate change and need greater support now. People are facing increasing food and water shortages, losing land and being forced from their homes, dealing with rising cases of malaria, and coping with more frequent flooding and storm surges.

The report argues that unless wealthy, developed countries like Australia take urgent action to curb emissions, some island nations face the very real threat of becoming uninhabitable.

Pacific leaders will raise the issue of climate change with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at the Pacific Islands Forum from 4 – 7 August.

Oxfam Australia Executive Director Andrew Hewett said with only months to go until the crucial UN negotiations in Copenhagen in December, it was clear Australia needed to show Pacific leaders it was willing to do its fair share to address one of the most pressing challenges in the region.

“People are already leaving their homes because of climate change, with projections that 75 million people in the Asia-Pacific region will be forced to relocate by 2050 if climate change continues unabated. Not all will have the option of relocating within their own country, so it’s vital that the Australian Government starts working with Pacific governments to plan for this now,” Mr Hewett said.

The report details how Pacific Islanders are already adapting to their changing climate. Fijians, for example, are taking steps to ‘climate-proof’ their villages by trialling salt-resistant varieties of staple foods, planting mangroves and native grasses to halt coastal erosion, protecting fresh water wells from saltwater intrusion and relocating homes and community buildings away from vulnerable coastlines.

Elsewhere, the Malaita provincial government in the Solomon Islands is looking for land to resettle people from low-lying outer atolls, while people living in the outer atolls of the Federated States of Micronesia are facing food and water shortages and moving to higher ground.

The report argues that the fairest and most cost-effective way of dealing with climate change is to ensure the most extreme impacts are avoided altogether, as Australia would be called on to respond to more emergencies in the region. As the wealthiest country in the region and the highest per capita polluter, Australia must prevent further climate damage to the Pacific by urgently adopting higher targets – reducing emissions by at least 40 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020 – and urging other developed countries to do the same.

The Government’s commitment of $150 million to help Pacific Islanders adapt to climate change needs to be at least doubled to meet the most urgent adaptation needs in the Pacific. This must be in addition to Australia’s existing aid commitments so that crucial poverty alleviation efforts are not compromised.

Source: Oxfam Australia

Related Links:
“The Future is Here: Climate Change in the Pacific” – Oxfam Australia

A Syrian man sits in the village of Ain al-Tineh, 70 kms southwest of Damascus. Photo credit: AFP

June 2, 2009 (AFP) – Some 160 villages in northern Syria were deserted by their residents in 2007 and 2008 because of climate change, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The report drawn up by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) warns of potential armed conflict for control of water resources in the Middle East.

“The 2007/8 drought caused significant hardship in rural areas of Syria. In the northeast of the country, a reported 160 villages have been entirely abandoned and the inhabitants have had to move to urban areas,” it said.

In Syria and also in Jordan, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, “climate change threatens to reduce the availability of scarce water resources, increase food insecurity, hinder economic growth and lead to large-scale population movements,” the report said.

“This could hold serious implications for peace in the region,” the Canada-based institute said.

The study, financed by Denmark, predicts a hotter, drier and less predictable climate in the Middle East, “already considered the world’s most water-scarce and where, in many places, demand for water already outstrips supply.”

Oli Brown, who co-wrote the report with Alec Crawford, said: “Climate change itself poses real security concerns to the region. It could lead to increased militarisation of strategic natural resources, complicating peace agreements.”

“Israel is already using climate change as an excuse to increase their control over the water resources in the region,” he said.

In the study’s conclusions, Brown and Crawford said: “As a region, the Levant produces a tiny fraction of global emissions — less than one percent of the world total.

The exception among Levant countries is Israel, “whose emissions — 11.8 metric tonnes per capita — exceed the European average of 10.05 tonnes,” they said.

“This may exacerbate the existing deep mistrust of the West, including Israel, which would be seen as causing a problem that it is unable or unwilling to resolve,” they said.

The study also revealed the challenge posed by population growth.

“The combined population of the Levant will grow to 71 million by 2050 from 42 million in 2008″ with major implications for water demand, food supply, housing and jobs, it said.

The IISD report said there is much that Middle Eastern governments and authorities, civil society and the international community can do to respond to climate change and the threats it may pose to regional peace and security.

“They can promote a culture of conservation in the region, help communities and countries adapt to the impacts of climate change, work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and foster greater cooperation on their shared resources,” it said.

The report says climate change could affect farm productivity in Syria, where agriculture represents 23 percent of gross domestic product and employs 30 percent of the economically active population.

“Some 13 percent of agricultural land was downgraded between 1980 and 2006 because of… urban expansion and agricultural, industrial and tourism activities,” Fayez Asrafy, a desertification expert, told AFP.

“Rainfall shrank by 10 millimetres (a year) between 1956 and 2006 while temperatures rose by (an average) 0.5 degrees Celsius, though below the worldwide average of 0.6 degrees,” Syrian meteorologist Khales Mawed said.

The IISD predicts even modest global warming would lead to a 30-percent drop in water in the Euphrates, which runs through Turkey, Syria and Iraq, while the Dead Sea would shrink in volume by 80 percent by the end of the century.

Source: AFP