Climate change and refugee migration focus of annual Gandhi peace talk
Climate change and refugee migration focus of annual Gandhi peace talk
The World Bank predicts that if we do not meet global sustainable development goals, the number of people displaced by climate change will be in the hundreds of millions by the 2050s.
Gandhi statue in Hamilton Photo credit: Flickr
The summer of 2023 proved Canadians are not immune from the climate crisis. A summer of intense wildfires saw the evacuation of communities from British Columbia to Nova Scotia as well as Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories.
The average annual area of Canadian forests burned by wildfires has been steadily growing since the 1950s. Combine those losses with the irreversible damage to permafrost and glaciers in the northern regions of the country, and all indications point to the fact that Canadians are not immune to becoming climate refugees.
“This year the size and intensity of wildfires was unlike anything we have seen before. That’s what a hotter, more unstable climate looks like in the Canadian context. In addition, we saw people lose their homes this year in floods in several provinces. No country is exempt from the impacts of climate change,” Robert McLeman, Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University told Small Change via email.
McLeman will give the Annual Mahatma Gandhi Lecture on Nonviolence on October 5th focusing on “Climate Change Refugee Migration.”
According to McLeman, each year tens of millions of people globally are displaced by floods, storms, drought, wildfires and other extreme weather events.
In 2022, the total number of newly displaced people attributable to extreme weather was over 32 million – exceeding the 28.3 million people newly displaced because of violence and conflict according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2023.
McLeman knows that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe due to rising average global temperatures. Those extreme weather events are putting more people at risk of displacement.
Additionally, crop failures due to extreme weather in Canada, as well as other nations, have adverse impacts on global food supplies at a time when the conflict in Ukraine is already constraining food exports from that region and causing food prices to rise. Ultimately, the poorest people in the most impoverished nations are affected the most severely.
Risks that will become more apparent in coming decades include rising sea levels that threaten coastal communities along with increased average summertime temperatures that will become so intense that it will be physically dangerous to be outdoors in many densely populated areas of the world.
“If nothing is done to address the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions and if we do not meet global sustainable development goals, the number of people displaced by the impacts of climate change in low- and middle-income countries in the 2050s will number in the hundreds of millions. That prediction does not come from some radical environmentalist organization. It comes from the World Bank.” McLeman stated.
Ultimately, global peace will be impacted by the climate crisis. McLeman shared that specialists in the field of conflict and security analysis refer to climate change as a ‘threat multiplier.’
It’s not that climate change necessarily starts conflicts or violence on its own, but it exacerbates the underlying causes of existing violent conflicts in many countries changing competition over resources into violence and conflict. This is particularly true at local scales.
“We see this, for example, in Mali, where Canada has in recent years contributed millions of dollars in assistance and small numbers of peacekeeping soldiers in an attempt to bring peace and stability to this conflict prone nation,” McLeman said.
“The political tensions between rival groups have been exacerbated by droughts in recent years, with the World Bank estimating that 400,000 people are affected each year, causing out-migration to cities that lack the capacity to accommodate new arrivals, and conflicts between pastoralists and farmers in rural areas over scarce resources,” he added.
McLeman has been studying the issues of climate change and refugee migration for over twenty years. In fact, it was the subject of his Master’s dissertation at the University of Hong Kong in 1995.
“Back then, the notion that climate change might displace large numbers of people around the would seemed very abstract, a problem that appeared to be very much ‘over the horizon,’ something we could worry about later.”
The 1990’s saw active conflicts in the Balkans, Middle East and central and eastern Africa creating million of refugees. While armed conflicts like these continue to displace millions, the world is experiencing exponentially growing streams of people displaced for environmental reasons.
“Fortunately, we live in a nation with tremendous resources and capacity to assist people displaced by the impacts of climate change and to help them return to and rebuild their communities. But what will become of those who live in countries not so fortunate? How will they cope with a climate disrupted future? And what can we do to help? These are some of the topics I hope to address in my talk,” McLeman shared.
Rama Singh, founder of the Annual Mahatma Gandhi Peace Festival in Hamilton, maintains, “the festival has not been about Gandhi, but about his ideas of how to promote peace, justice and welfare of the community. Gandhi’s concept of nonviolence was comprehensive affecting all aspects of life, not just war and peace.”
This year’s theme, Climate Change Refugee Migration, focuses on one of the most immediate and serious global consequences of climate change – people’s life and death.
Dr. Robert McLeman is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. A former diplomat, Dr. McLeman is an influential scholar and researcher of how climate change affects the migration and displacement of people in Canada and around the world. He has served as a consultant on environmental migration for government agencies in Europe and North America, the World Bank, OECD, and multiple UN organizations.
Dr. McLeman also served as Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report, leading an international team of scientists in assessing the impacts of climate change on human health, wellbeing, migration and conflict.
His book, Climate and Human Migration: Past experience, future challenges (Cambridge University Press, 2014), has been the primary textbook for undergraduate and graduate teaching on the topic for almost a decade.
The Annual Mahatma Gandhi Lecture on Nonviolence presented by Dr. Robert McLeman takes place Thursday, October 5 from 7 to 9 pm at the Peter George Centre for Living and Learning located on the McMaster University campus.
The Gandhi Peace Festival continues Saturday, October 7, 2023 from 10 am to 2 pm outside Hamilton City Hall with entertainment, speakers, and refreshments culminating in the annual peace march.
All events are free to the public.