This piece is part of the Climate Crossroads series. Read the rest of the series here.

Climate change is pushing people out of their homes and homelands. (Wikimedia Commons)

by Mady Hart (SFS ‘23)

The World Bank’s latest Groundswell report warned that, across six world regions, “over 216 million people could move within their countries by 2050.” Climate-induced migration, particularly within countries, is spreading around the world, and internal migrant flows are projected to keep growing throughout the next half of this century. These internally displaced persons, or IDPs, are defined as those who are “forced to leave home but [who remain] within the state of which [they are] a national” due to a change in their climate. Although politicians and policymakers are making efforts to address climate change, there is and will be significant climate-induced internal displacement.

The responses of aid programs toward climate-induced IDPs face two main issues. First, many large international aid organizations, or even national organizations, produce top-down IDP aid programs. They fail to acknowledge the unique cultures and environments that climate catastrophe often forces people to leave. Second, aid is often provided after crises—when in fact threatened communities should be equipped and prepared for displacement before crises begin. Such preparation could not only potentially decrease the amount of displacement itself but also set up safe and established routes and plans for people when packing up and moving is unavoidable.

Failed Responses

Failed responses to climate IDPs stem from international and state-level plans that fail to engage with the needs of local communities, last-minute ideas—as opposed to proactive and nuanced ones—or some combination of the two. From Haiti to Darfur to Nigeria, these failures demonstrate the need to engage preemptively with local communities.

After an earthquake leveled much of Haiti in 2010 and more than 1.5 million people lost their homes, richer countries and their aid organizations sent Haiti billions of dollars for reconstruction. However, despite all of this aid, very little of the money had made its way to IDP camps. Seven months after the earthquake, 40 percent of IDP camps still lacked access to water, and 30 percent did not even have access to any toilets. When discussing the failure, former President Clinton—chosen by then-President Obama to co-lead the U.S. aid effort—said that “it was a mistake to work outside of the Haitian government, creating parallel structures that are unaccountable.” The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance noted that some of these problems would have been solved if donors had focused on rebuilding and not simply on NGOs, as well as if NGOs had worked with the Haitian government and respected local authorities. Indeed, most of the aid went to NGOs, which overwhelmingly mismanaged the funds. NGOs should have worked with the Haitian government and knowledgeable local actors in order to tailor the aid towards long-term solutions, such as rebuilding. Instead, they focused solely on temporary camps that ultimately remained humanitarian failures.

In 2010, an earthquake leveled much of Haiti — and the international development community failed to help the country redevelop. (Flickr, Logan Abassi)

Across the world, in Darfur, Sudan, more frequent droughts have caused severe environmental degradation, which has only intensified resource conflict in the region. For many people in Darfur, desertification has significantly altered their ways of life. Droughts in the region have caused soil degradation, a main component of desertification, which has stopped agricultural production in certain areas, depriving people of their livelihoods and driving them out of the area.

This environmental change intensified ethnic tensions and conflict in the region. The conflict is caused primarily by the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement against the Government of Sudan. Many civilians caught in the crossfires fled to displacement camps, although militias targeted these camps as well. International aid groups often focus on climate-induced migration and conflict as two different issues—but, in reality, they go hand in hand.

This is the root of the problem: climate change itself often worsens living standards and thereby increases the chances of societal conflict. International and domestic groups should develop long-term programs that respect local customs and improve standards of living.

In Nigeria, climate change is causing declining agricultural productivity, more heatwaves, and declining rainfall in many areas, all of which are destroying sources of income for many people. To tackle these issues of climate-induced impoverishment, Nigeria set up a National Emergency Relief Agency (NEMA). This is an important step forward; however, NEMA has many shortcomings. The most crucial is its “silence on the roles of local government” and the “inability of the federal government to impose any structure or directives on any state or local government.” Ultimately, there need to be reconstruction efforts on the local and state levels, and without it, NEMA can’t adequately address the issues the government charged it to. And, more importantly, why were some Nigerians’ incomes so precarious in the first place? Tackling climate displacement requires dealing with old economic development issues of poverty and inequality that existed even before climate catastrophes arrived.

Climate change is worst for mobile indigenous communities. Nomads across the world are used to freedom of movement, whether in Mongolia, in the Middle East, or in North America. Climate catastrophes often significantly hamper these freedoms—if non-nomadic governments grant these communities that freedom at all. In addition, mobile people are often left out of discussions of displacement; they are considered to be moving anyways. These people deserve more attention from the international community, too.

Development, Not Humanitarianism

However, there have been much better responses to climate-induced displacement. These responses generally have two qualities in common: they value the importance of local culture and customs, and they prioritize both preparedness and long-term reconstruction efforts.

A shining example of this kind of response is in the Búzi region of Mozambique. In 2001, a German development cooperation program, GTZ, arrived to provide aid after severe flooding in the area in 2000. These floods killed around 800 people, and around 250,000 people lost their homes. In addition, experts warned that greater levels of rainfall would become more likely in the future, inducing further floods.

Importantly, GTZ’s rural development program had a disaster risk management team. Their analysis found that a third of the district’s inhabitants were extremely vulnerable to natural events. To be sure, the floods made that obvious. But the team did its due diligence: it mapped out the most flood-prone areas, after which it assessed where emergency evacuations could take place. The team also established local committees in nine communities. Locals became extremely involved in GTZ’s program, establishing a local early warning system and taking readings of river levels every day. These warnings could alert the local committees to take action; these committees, for their part, began organizing evacuation plans disseminated in Ndau (the local dialect). GTZ also worked with schools to develop lesson plans on the impact of climate change and the usefulness of disaster risk management, thus imparting community tools to local children.

This program was a success because it implemented both proactive, long-term plans, as well as emphasizing local response and initiative. Indeed, in 2005 and 2007, the areas GTZ operated in once again experienced extreme flooding—but this time, most of the locals stayed safe. It is interesting to note, too, that this was treated as more of a development issue, rather than as a humanitarian problem. GTZ and their local associates focused on long-term responses ahead of time and treated flood contingency plans as a local development issue, rather than trying to solve crises after they had already occurred in a stopgap manner.

Think Proactively, Act Local

Most responses to climate-induced displacement fail because their top-down, reactive humanitarian approaches fail to engage local communities and existing governing structures. Instead, international aid groups should seek to emulate groups like GTZ. First, a local development-oriented approach that creates proactive contingency plans for high-risk areas allows for the implementation of both short-term and long-term solutions. And, second, centering the needs and lifestyles of local communities allows them to maintain their ways of life while also ensuring that they can gain control of the processes required to adequately respond to climate change issues. Humanitarian aid often tries to provide quick, one-fits-all solutions to problems, and in the face of climate-induced displacement, these solutions will fail miserably.