A new report from human rights groups working along the border looks at how climate change impacts migration and refugees.
Ama Francis is the climate director at the International Refugee Assistance Project — it’s one of the groups behind the report, along with Al Otro Lado, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and Haitian Bridge Alliance.
She says most reporting about climate change and migration looks at the big picture. Like a 2020 analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace, that projected more than a billion people would be forced from home due to climate disasters by 2050.
“This is different because we looked at migrant-level, individual, household accounts of climate change impacts,” Francis said.
Francis says report authors spoke with more than 3,600 people who’d left their countries and were trying to get protection in the U.S. They found more than 40% reported experiencing at least one natural disaster back home, like hurricanes, floods and extreme heat. Many were also fleeing ripple effects from those events, like violence and a loss of livelihood.
Francis says to gather the data, report authors asked migrants and asylum seekers about a number of different climate and environmental disasters.
“We included climate-fueled disasters — so the types of disasters that are. made worse by climate change, um, whether they are rapid-onset disasters like hurricanes, or slower-onset disasters like drought,” they said. “Separately, we included the secondary, down-the-line effects of these disasters — so we asked people if they had experienced crop failure, for example.”
Francis says asylum and refugee officers in the U.S. should be trained on how to recognize those issues in people seeking protection — and the data could be used to help.
