Environmental refugees and global warming in Sub-Saharan Africa
ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2010) — Climate change and environmental degradation are likely to trigger increased migration in Sub-Saharan Africa with potentially devastating effects on the hundreds of millions of especially poor people, according to a paper in the International Journal of Global Warming.
Environmental changes are especially pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), explain Ulrike Grote of the Institute for Environmental Economics and World Trade, at the Leibniz University of Hannover, and Koko Warner of the United Nations University Institute of Environmental and Human Change in Bonn, Germany. Today, degradation is a serious problem for 32 countries in Africa, and a third of a billion people already face water scarcity. Grote and Warner have analysed the latest data on environmental factors to determine what changes are most likely to trigger migration in SSA. They point to evidence from different branches of research, environmental sciences, migration research as well as development economics. They focus specifically on the effects on four countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Niger, and Senegal covering different regions in SSA. They are characterised by very different natural resource endowments, population and country sizes, political situations and environmental influences, thus providing very different pictures of migration. … The team explains that in the four countries studies, environmental changes like soil degradation and erosion are especially prevalent in rural areas where poverty is pronounced. In Ghana, these slowly occurring environmental changes, coupled with severe and frequent droughts have been partly responsible for internal migration from the north to the south. Similarly, in Mozambique, droughts triggered internal migration from rural areas in the south to coastal and urban centres. In Niger, these environmental changes related to the expansion of the Sahel desert have resulted not only in internal but also border-crossing regional migration flows. Also, in Senegal, internal and international migration resulted from the environmental changes with respect to the peanut basin where job and farming opportunities decreased with increasing environmental degradation. …
