Climate Change and Migration in Africa: What is at stake?
“It’s already begun. Young people are leaving. They’re going to the big cities, to Younde and Duala. People are starting to leave and we no longer know how we’ll be able to manage,” Says Oscar Osman, a Cameroon citizen.
Africa has become an epicenter of violent conflicts and forced migration thanks to frequent eruption of natural calamities linked to climate change.
Research shows that most migrants who move to avoid environmental problems do so for relatively short distances and durations, and that the poorest and most vulnerable people are the least likely to move.
While some governments see migration as a problem and something to discourage, for the migrants themselves movement is a form of adaptation to climate change.
Climate migration can be short-term or long-term; an annual movement to cope with yearly flooding, or a sudden response to a natural disaster that has wiped out an entire town. As with many trends, it is impossible to assign total causation for the migration of peoples to climate change; many other social, political, and cultural factors are always involved.
Throughout much of Africa, climate migration is driving urbanisation, one of the defining features of Africa’s shifting demographics. According to the UN, by 2050, Africa’s urban population will jump from 414 million to 1.2 billion people.
According to experts’, Horn of Africa and Sahel regions have become flashpoints as famines and water stress disrupt the livelihoods of agro-pastoral communities.
While urbanization can propel economic growth, an explosive growth in urban populations can place a strain on cities’ limited resources, and further exacerbate existing stresses. In particular, climate change is expected to further increase the number of Africans living in slums: as of 2010, 62.7 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population was slumdwellers, more than anywhere else in the world.
The crowding of African slums, many of which are low-lying and thus themselves prone to flooding, is in turn likely to increase vulnerabilities to malnutrition, poor sanitation, air pollution, and disease.
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