An article that caught my attention this week was “How Climate Change Is Fuelling the U.S. Border Crisis”. What struck me about the article was that “U.S. immigration policy has sought to be more deterrent in managing the border, but it has underestimated the impact of climate change as a root cause of regional mass migration”. It’s clear that the climate change crisis is getting worse, but the response from the U.S. and other countries is still very weak. The threat of climate change is growing so rapidly that the IEP, an international think tank, predicts that 1.2 billion people worldwide could be displaced by climate change and natural disasters by 2050. While climate change is not the only reason for refugees, it creates many social problems, including soaring food prices, and in the worst cases, conflicts that trigger refugee crises.
Therefore, it is crucial that the world recognizes the problem of climate migration now. President Biden’s call to raise awareness of climate migration is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go. It is needed sustained strategies, not just a short-term assistance plan. A holistic and collaborative approach involving governments, communities, and the international community is needed, including working with local communities to implement climate-resilient projects, working to secure climate financing from international financial institutions, and establishing a U.S. government working group on climate migration. “No policy, wall, strengthening of a frontier, of border controls is really going to address the underlying issue,” said UNICEF’s Carerra, and it’s time for a more fundamental and realistic policy on climate refugees and borders.
One reply on “week 13”
Jungmi,
I like your final blog post! I think it is now dawning on the world that the threat posed by global climate change is not only urgent and real but also as important from an international security standpoint as military threats. If we don’t find a way to limit greenhouse warming, our planet will become increasingly uninhabitable, thereby making every problem worse! The climate refugee issue is a good example. The idea that there could be more than a billion people by 2050 who are displaced due to climate is staggering. And there is no way that this many people can be accommodated as refugees. So the world needs to figure out how to keep them from attempting to migrate in the first place. –Professor Wallerstein