Escape from the climate

Despite the advance of knowledge and awareness, it is not yet immediately intuitive for everyone to think that the phenomenon of human migrations - which every year sees millions of people move from one territory to another - is substantially connected with the state health of the planet and with the implications of climate change that we have been going through for some time. Instead, the two phenomena are deeply linked, so much so that, we are told, the climate crisis is increasingly becoming a humanitarian emergency.

The UN agency for refugees (unhcr) recently recalled that vulnerable people, including refugees and displaced persons, who live in areas of conflict and in fragile countries. On the one hand, due to extreme weather phenomena such as floods, storms and droughts, an average of 21.5 million new refugees have been displaced annually over the past 10 years; on the other hand, climate change is itself a multiplier of other risk factors, primarily food insecurity.

In our world, food is becoming more and more inaccessible due to the scarcity of water and productive land and the consequent impact on crops and food production: the prices of foodstuffs tend to increase, making it extremely difficult to access to food for many impoverished or displaced communities. Globally, an estimated 193 million people were severely food insecure and in need of urgent assistance in 53 countries in 2021, an increase of nearly 40 million people from the previous peak reached in 2020. Numbers never recorded before. Two examples among all: the Horn of Africa - the African region that includes Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya - is experiencing the worst drought for four decades now with 23 million people in conditions of serious food insecurity; in Afghanistan, another country hit by a severe drought, almost 19 million people live in a condition of food insecurity.

Over 70% of the world's refugees and displaced people come from the most climate-vulnerable countries, including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria and Yemen. Most of those displaced by climate impacts remain within their own countries: many of those who have previously been forced to flee violence in vulnerable areas are again uprooted from their host territories due to catastrophic storms, droughts and floods.

In these global conditions, in addition to asking for concrete actions for environmental protection, the United Nations agency urges States to further intensify protection and assistance to all people in need, including those are displaced by natural disasters and the effects of climate change. A necessity that will inevitably be one of the key points in the near future, to prevent an increasingly large part of the human population from seeing their living conditions deteriorate further.


Stefano Caredda
NP May 2023