How Climate Change Worsens the Migration Crisis

One of climate change’s harshest blows lands when one’s shelter is lost. Imagine a hurricane destroying your home and losing belongings and means of transportation in the course of hours. Imagine then a government that is either too incompetent or too corrupt to manage the crisis.

This is what happened in 2020, when Hurricanes Eta and Iota struck Central America and drove refugees to seek better lives in the US. A UNICEF spokesperson described the problem: “Crises in the region are not felt just once, they are felt repeatedly and for years.” 

As the world gets hotter, extreme weather events are intensified. Climate change creates more powerful, more frequent droughts, floods, hurricanes, and tornados, which wreak destruction on people’s homes and food supply, especially in areas already suffering poverty or armed conflict. Moreover, hundreds of millions of people globally live on coasts that may become extremely dangerous due to rising sea levels—such as on the Bahamas.

There is no set legal term for people who flee climate change across international borders, but colloquially, they’re known as “climate refugees.” This lack of legal definition means they can’t access the legal protections that being a refugee entails. It also contributes to the impossibility of estimating how many climate refugees there are or will be. The New York Times offers a tentative estimate of how many refugees might flee to the US from Central America and Mexico from 2020-2050 due to climate change: between 680,000 to 30 million.

Venezuela, where the majority of Chicago’s new asylum seekers are from, has suffered a severe drought for the past decade, leading to widespread food and water shortages, and as of 2021, some 75% of the population makes less than $1.90 a day. Its government has not demonstrated a capacity to deal with this and other crises, prompting more than 7 million people to flee the country in hope of a better life. 

So, the question is not if climate migration will continue but how the receiving countries will adapt and welcome their new inhabitants.

To learn more about Chicago’s migration crisis, watch the recording of last month’s Chicago In Focus. To learn more about the White House’s assessment of how climate change will affect migration, read their 2021 draft report.

 To join the Environmental Action Committee, email us at environment@lwvchicago.org.