The lack of water, extreme heat and sea level rise will bring the displacement of people from all impoverished regions to every place where it is possible to escape to. FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
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The lack of water, extreme heat and sea level rise will bring the displacement of people from all impoverished regions to every place where it is possible to escape to. FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) started on November 10, 2025 and will continue till November 21 in Belem, Brazil. On November 7 at the COP30 Leaders’ Summit in Belém, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell reflected on the global journey from Rio to Paris and issued a clear call for faster and fairer delivery of climate action and finance. Stiell highlighted how the world’s climate response has already changed the trajectory of global warming. He also mentioned that the clean energy transition is now booming, and last year, two trillion dollars flowed into renewables, twice as much as fossil fuels. This is good news for gradual climate change mitigation, but it is unclear how to tackle the current climate refugees and future flashpoints.
Al Gore, in his book The Future, mentioned that the fastest-growing new category of refugees is climate refugees. Currently, a “refugee” is defined in international law as someone with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” This definition does not include those permanently displaced across borders due to climate breakdown. This is a problem because this means that those forced to leave their country as a consequence of climate breakdown cannot legally be called “refugees”. Some suggest that they must be classed as “climate migrants”. However, “refugee” status confers certain rights, which “migrant” status does not.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star’s Google News channel. In The State of the World’s Refugees: In Search of Solidarity, published in 2012, former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon noted that the traditional causes of forced displacement—conflict and human rights abuses—are now increasingly intertwined with and compounded by other factors, and many of them relate to the relentless advance of climate change. So, the migration related to climate change is complicated and has a snowball effect. For example, climate migrants from African nations arrive in Southern Europe, but because of widespread drought and crop failure, displacement occurs in Greece, Southern Italy and Spain. So, the migrants face multiple displacements.
The World Bank estimates that 216 million people will be internally displaced by 2050 due to slow-onset climate events like droughts. This prediction excludes Europe and North America, as well as displacement caused by extreme weather. Therefore, the actual number is likely to be much higher. Considering all factors, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) suggests that 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2060 as a result of climate breakdown, increasing to two billion by 2100. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), weather-related displacement in 2020 reached nearly 31 million, including multiple migrations.
In 2021, the US National Intelligence Council assessment identified eleven countries and two regions as being especially vulnerable to climate instability. Almost half of the nations are in South and East Asia, including Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. The two regions that have been recognised as the world’s most vulnerable to climate breakdown are Central Africa and the small island states of the Pacific. Another hotspot is Central America, where a combination of extreme poverty, climate breakdown and gang violence is driving the growing unrest.
Think about the Sahel region in Africa, which is situated directly south of the Sahara Desert. The land stretches almost 5,500 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. The key countries in the region include Senegal, Mali, Nigar, Chad and Sudan. In this region, climate breakdown driven by global warming impacts conflict in two ways. One is magnifying the scale of ongoing hostilities. Another is by acting as a driver of new conflict as a consequence of mass migration or water shortages.
The sea level rise within the next eighty years will have a serious impact on developed countries as well. A major part of the Florida and Miami population will be displaced. In the UK, it has been predicted that the residents of Lincolnshire will need a new home within the next two decades. By the second half of the century, if the temperature remains 40 degrees Celsius steadily, then the southern and central parts of the UK could well be driving people out of their homes and towards cooler parts of the country. It is to be noted here that a couple of years ago, Israel announced a major national plan on climate change that included a recommendation to build “sea fences” near its maritime borders on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, linked with impassable barriers on its land borders, to protect against a predicted wave of climate refugees.
The obvious drivers of climate conflict are competition for water and fertile land. But other drivers need to be considered. For example, the world’s major fossil fuel exporters, including Russia and the oil-producing states of the Middle East, suffer major economic problems as the demand for oil and gas falls during the transition to a global economy built upon renewable energy. These economic circumstances will lead to social unrest. Statistics suggest that more than twenty countries, including Chad, Algeria, Iraq and Nigeria’s fifty percent of export revenue depends on fossil fuel and their economy could face complete collapse.
The most valuable and essential asset on the planet is water. Climate conflicts emerge from water shortage. South Asian and South-East Asian nations that depend for water and irrigation upon the great rivers that drain the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) will face some consequences. Because rivers in these regions are all fed by the ice that covers the HKH. Together, they supply the water to irrigate crops that feed two billion people across the region. If the glacier disappears because of climate change, then this leads to potentially cataclysmic collapse in agriculture from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the west and to Myanmar, Vietnam and China in the east.
In short, the lack of water, extreme heat and sea level rise, even if it occurs on a different schedule, will bring the displacement of people from all impoverished regions to every place where it is possible to escape to. This looming catastrophe leaves no room for delay. The 30th Conference of the Parties must deliver a concrete, coordinated, and immediate response to tackle this crisis head-on.
Dr Kanan Purkayastha is fellow at The Institution of Environmental Sciences and adjunct faculty at University of the West of England.
Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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