The Daily Times
BY CHARLES MPAKA
19:12:52 - 20 July 2009
If
we cannot prevent floods from occurring, if we cannot stop climate
change impacts, we must not prevent people from migrating. What we need
to do is to create conditions for the refugees to benefit from their
running away. CHARLES MPAKA writes.
When floods hit, people flee. When land becomes a desert and
agricultural communities lose their means of survival, some people will
often move elsewhere for a new life.
To run away from climate change-related disasters is a popular response
around the world. It is natural, in fact. For that, terms such as
‘environmental refugees’ and ‘climate change-induced migration’ are
becoming common.
Climate change will remain part of human life on earth even for the
entire century. But the world will not live all that long with hands on
the head, crying for God’s help. Mitigation efforts will have to be
intensified. So should adaptation mechanisms, one of which should be to
look at the possible gains that could be gotten out of some of the many
disasters to come and from responses such as migration.
Some activists estimate that by 2050, the number of people that will
have been forced to move primarily because of climate change impacts
will have been between 200 million and 1 billion.
It sounds alarming. And that is the tone in which climate change is
preached: so that people are alarmed at the probability of a very bleak
life on earth if they keep up with reckless green house gas emissions
and rampant environmental degradation.
Cecilia Tacoli, Senior Researcher at International Institute for
Environment and Development (IIED), argues that these mass refugee
statistics, are ‘alarmist predictions’ and are open to consideration.
But she does not deny the question of human migration because of
climate change.
“What we do know is that mobility and migration are key responses to
environmental and non-environmental transformations and pressures,”
says Tacoli in a paper prepared for UNFPA last month.
According to her, such responses should be a basis for measures of
coping with climate change. The first thing to be done should be to
look at migration from a positive viewpoint: that migration can help
solve the problem of climate change or mitigate its impacts.
“This requires a radical change in policy-makers’ perceptions of
migration as a problem, and a better understanding of the role of local
and national institutions in supporting and accommodating mobility,”
Tacoli says.
Human migration, climate-caused or otherwise, is often seen by
governments and institutions as a problem and therefore a subject of
prevention strategies.
Malawi has in the past decade seen an increase in urban population as
people move from rural areas. The causes for such movements vary,
including those that are climate change-related. Climate change
influences have reasonably affected negatively the productivity of
agriculture lands in rural areas, forcing some people to seek
alternative means of earning a living in the cities and in other
countries.
In response, government has in the Malawi Growth and Development
Strategy (MGDS) the programme of integrated rural development. The
programme intends to establish self-contained rural growth centres as
one way of preventing people from going to stay in urban centres.
The strategy makes sense especially when considered against
deteriorating standards of sanitation, increasing crime, stretched
health facilities and sorry housing conditions attributed to population
pressure in urban centres.
But it is also strategic that similar massive investments be made in
the urban centres where people flock to. Climate change has come upon
the earth. Droughts and floods will come. Hurricanes shall terrorise
people. Agriculture lands will be washed away. A hundred billion trees
planted today in the catchment areas of the Shire River will not stop
the floods from occurring in the Lower Shire in the next 20 to 30
years.
Shutting out all green house gas emission outlets of the world will not
stop the disasters over many years in future because much damage has
already been done. That is why scientists say that climate
change-related impacts being experienced today are not outcomes of the
present day environmental hazardous practices. They are results of
activities of hundreds of years ago.
This calls for governments to develop strategies that will accommodate
migration, not just those that prevent or restrict it. They should
include mechanisms that would enable the environmental refugees to make
gains from some forms of disasters.
Commentators have given the example of floods. Floods have caused loss
of life and property and much distress to people of Nsanje and Chikwawa
for many years. Balaka, Mangochi, Salima, Phalombe, Zomba and Karonga
have been added on to the list, some of them just recently.
But floods bring with them fertile soils and water. When the currents
have died, the refugees can go back and cultivate their field.
Government should thus invest in helping such people work in their
fields, instead of just dumping them in a ‘foreign’ community and leave
them to find the way out on their own.
Migration should not necessarily be a problem. Tacoli says there is
growing evidence suggesting that mobility, together with income
diversification, is an important measure to reduce vulnerability to
environmental and non-environmental risks.
“In many cases, mobility not only increases resilience but also enables
individuals and households to accumulate assets. As such, it will
probably play an increasingly crucial role in adaptation to climate
change,” she says.
She argues that policies that support and accommodate mobility and
migration are important not only for purposes of coping with climate
change impacts but also in achieving broader development goals.
Migration and mobility should therefore not be seen as disruptive and
requiring control and restrictive measures, she says.
“What is needed urgently is a radical change in perceptions of
migration, and a better understanding of the role that local and
national institutions need to play in making mobility be seen as part
of the solution rather than the problem” she says.
The migrant class are a human resource to be developed so they can
participate in dealing with climate change. In its 2007/08 Human
Development Report entitled Fighting climate change: Human Solidarity
in a divided world, UNDP describes human development as a sound
foundation for adaptation to climate change.
The organisation supports measures that promote equitable growth and
diversification of livelihoods, increase opportunities in health and
education, provide social and economic protection to the vulnerable
groups and improve on disaster management.
“That is why climate change adaptation planning should not be seen as a
new branch of public policy but as an integral part of wider strategies
for poverty reduction and human development,” says UNDP.
The risks arising from seeing climate change-related migration as part
of the problem include that it would result in inappropriate policies
that would do little to protect the rights of those most vulnerable to
climate change, says IIED.
Those that flee the disaster prone areas for instance to urban centres
could serve as sources of support to communities back home. They could
be a means of rehabilitating fallen agriculture in the village and
maintenance of others affected by climate change impacts. That is only
if their destination is prepared to provide them with development
structures which they can use to regain their life again and be
productive.
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