Submerged houses after floods on August 25, 2024 in Feni, Bangladesh. (Photo by Parvez Ahmad … [+]
The latest major United Nations report on climate change is out, and the results are just as grim as all the previous ones, with climate change-related extreme weather events causing ever more people to flee their homes, as well as destroying critical infrastructure. The report, while playing into some of the misunderstandings over climate-related migration, also highlights the need for a large amount of funds to go towards helping vulnerable communities protect themselves.
“Our planet is issuing more distress signals” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in a press statement accompanying the latest report on climate change from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The report is, as so many before it have been, full of dire warnings. Record heat levels, long-term sea level rise and acidification, and increasing adverse weather events were all seen in 2024, according to the report.
The report also noted that 2024 set records for the amount of people displaced by extreme weather events and disasters, with reportedly millions forced to flee their homes.
“Tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, and other hazards in 2024 led to the highest number of new displacements recorded for the past 16 years, contributed to worsening food crises, and caused massive economic losses,” reads the report.
Migration and displacement linked to climate change has been an increasingly visible issue in recent years, with world leaders warning of potentially ‘billions’ of people being forced to flee their homes, regions and even countries this coming century. Some of those numbers are completely pulled out of the air, or more generously are a result of poor understanding of statistics and predictive models, but are nonetheless often invoked to create a greater sense of urgency around climate change.
Such statements from world leaders are often criticized for leveraging developed countries’ fears over a refugee ‘influx’ in order to prompt climate action, in essence scaremongering over one issue to fight another. They also often give a very distorted picture of the realites of climate-related migration, which is much more a picture of short-term and local displacement within peoples’ regions, rather than a great northward migration. Typically, people suddenly displaced by major climate events will not have the means, or indeed the desire, to make long journeys, instead reaching the nearest point of safety and waiting to see when they can return to their homes.
Proponents of global climate justice argue that, in this light, instead of spending money on border security, policymakers would do well to invest instead in the kinds of resilience and mitigation projects that can help vulnerable communities quite literally weather the storm.
Such projects could cost hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars to properly implement around the ‘Global South,’ as has been the subject of recent COP climate conferences. Today’s WMO report drives this point home, emphasizing that in order to head off future displacement around the world (and not just in developing countries), major investments in projects like disaster early warning systems and other climate services are “vital.” The question remains, of course, where all that money will come from.