“What’s climate got to do with it?”
These days, it’s a common reaction for folks to balk when words such as “climate” and “environment” make their way into conversations about asylum and migration. At first glance, one can appreciate the confusion. Advocacy around the human contribution to climate change and environmental degradation traditionally occurs in academic and scientific spaces. In contrast, the fight to protect meaningful access to humanitarian pathways is caught up in today’s political theater. Regardless of our discomfort with recognizing the mortality of our land and ourselves, the truth is that climate change and migration are closely entwined. We can no longer pretend that the impact of climate change is not part and parcel of an individual’s decision to migrate. The truth has always been right in front of us; however, as advocates, our storytelling needs to be updated to reflect the nuances of why our clients and their loved ones leave home.
Let’s imagine that tomorrow, you and your family are woken up by the sound of armed and masked men stampeding into your home, trampling your gardens and farm grounds, screaming at you at gunpoint to leave your home, your life, before the sun sets, or else. As you scramble to accept your new reality and pack your children’s belongings into a small bag (how does one pack for a trip with no clear itinerary, schedule, or destination anyway?) you recall that the majority of the country hasn’t seen rainfall in months and that, just the other day, several people died in a landslide in a part of the country long used to farm rice, a thirsty commodity used to taking more from the land than it can ever give back. The thought might even cross your mind that, although the rest of the country stayed dry, your crops survived. Your former crops — they are yours no longer. You know that some advocacy groups have demanded local governments regulate farming, attempting to educate the systems on the link between climate, land degradation, and civil unrest. Like most generally well-informed but busy citizens, you understood without being told that the government has failed to rise to the occasion. Rather than heeding the warnings of the citizens focused on preventing future harm to their community, the government has its hands tied, pretending to control the behavior of foreign corporations extracting natural resources while accepting off-the-book payments that come in exchange for continued extraction.
As you leave your village before nightfall to make your way north, trying to remember the expected water levels of the rivers in the Darien Gap at this time of year, your mind pushes away any memories of the last several months. Instead, you focus on the task at hand — ensuring your children and their families are safe, and that you can collect enough money to cover everyone’s passage through the next several borders you’ll inevitably have to cross.
Stories like these underlie Las Americas’ efforts to illuminate the relationship between climate change and migration in the Americas. Since spring 2023, we’ve partnered with the International Refugee Assistance Project, Al Otro Lado, KIND, and Haitian Bridge Alliance to commit to collecting information from the populations we serve on the impact of climate occurrences and environmental changes — and more often than not, climate shows up as a factor contributing to displacement. According to the United Nations, “Most refugees and internally displaced people … come from highly climate-vulnerable countries where weather shocks and worsening climatic conditions add to the challenges that make sustained peace and safe return difficult to achieve.” Moreover, many have shared that this is not their first displacement as a result of disruption to their livelihood and limited access to livable land — it is common to learn that families experienced multiple, overlapping traumatic events, making the role of climate change intractable and easy to miss.
That’s why we are committed to expanding pathways to humanitarian protection and asylum protection as a cornerstone of the human right to migrate. Next month, you can come back to our website to find more information on the individuals we’ve interviewed and their stories, as well as a comprehensive report from IRAP on the truth supported by these numbers — we can no longer pretend that our environments are separate from our ability to sustain a livelihood. No invisible line in the sand calling itself a border can change the course of a storm, a drought, a flood, an earthquake, or a hurricane.
Jennifer Babaie is the Director of Advocacy and Legal Services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas.
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