Cities need to plan for accommodating people displaced by climate change

In the next three decades, it is expected, humanity would have turned an exclusively urban species.  By then almost 80 to 90 percent of people would be living in urban areas.  At the moment, cities in the Global South are growing much faster than they did in industrialized countries 100 or more years ago. 

The world is fast waking up to the problem of people displaced by climate change.  People opting for aspirational migration are as such moving into cities from villages.  With more and more people being forcefully displaced by various reasons including development projects, conflicts and climate change, the additional population will be huge for the cities to manage.  Most of cities are already struggling with providing basic infrastructure and amenities to the incoming migrants who often settle in informal locations and in the most unhygienic conditions. 

The addition of these new lot would mean a huge expansion of the informal cities and thus a great responsibility of the city governments and authorities to plan development according to not only meet the basic needs of these migrants but also to see that they get dignified shelter, better livelihoods and ensured rights in urban governance.  Further, cities also need to ensure that unplanned settlement of the informal city dwellers should not exert more pressure on the already shrinking water commons and other natural resources.  For that to happen, cities need to stay alert on the increasing problems created by climate change and related disasters.

Climate induced disasters on the rise

In the last decade, extreme weather and climate related events such as floods, storms and heatwaves have caused 83 percent of disasters triggered by natural hazards. 

During this decade, almost 1.7 billion people around the world have been affected by climate and weather-related disasters. 

Further, during this time, these extreme weather- and climate-related disasters have killed more than 410,000 people.  Most of these people, a vast majority of them, are from low and lower-middle income countries.  Heatwaves and storms have been the biggest killers.  According to the World Disasters Report 2020, the number of climate and weather-related disasters has been increasing since the 1960s, and has risen almost 35 percent since the 1990s. The proportion of all disasters attributable to climate and extreme weather events has also increased significantly during this time, from 76% of all disasters during the 2000s to 83 percent in the 2010s. 

The increased number of disasters has impacted the migration patterns.  The number of internally displaced people (IDP) (meaning people who migrate due to various reasons within one’s own country) caused by climate change has been growing exponentially.  As per the latest report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the number of internally displaced people has gone up by almost 7.7 million just in one year.  24.9 million people were internally displaced in 2019 due to natural disasters and extreme weather events.  The number of such people in 2018 stood at 17.2 million.  Nearly 1,900 disasters triggered these 24.9 million new displacements across 140 countries and territories in 2019, said the IDMC 2020 report. This is the highest figure recorded since 2012 and three times the number of displacements caused by conflict and violence.  Bangladesh, China, India and the Philippines each recorded more than 4 million disaster induced displacements. In fact for India the number stood at more than half a million. In the first half of 2020 alone, nearly 10 million people are reported to have been displaced by natural disasters and causes associated with climate change. This has really become a huge humanitarian crisis for the world and the cities have to bear the brunt of it.

Cities the new hot spots

A World Bank report of 2018 finds out that “internal climate migrants” or the IDPs could be more than 143 million by 2050, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South Asia. Most of these will be forced from their homes by extreme weather events.  Others will move from rural areas to cities due to slow-onset climate-related events, such as desertification.  Studies have already indicated that most of these forced migrations will be in the form of rural-urban migration within countries. 

Most of these migrants from rural areas will converge in Urban Hot Spots – as defined by some researchers – for food, jobs and shelter.  Most of these hot spots will occur in rapidly expanding cities in low- and middle-income countries. 

These hot spots, in the informal settlements, have also been termed as fragile cities by researchers because of the lack of proper services, infrastructure and governance. Crime, inequality and even threat related to climate change add to the fragility of these spots. 

In the next about three decades, it is expected, humanity would have turned an exclusively urban species.  By then almost 80 to 90 percent of people would be living in urban areas.  At the moment, cities in the Global South are growing much faster than they did in industrialized countries 100 or more years ago. Farmlands are getting saturated and cities are being marketed as the new growth engine for nations. That’s the norm. However, the new norm is the exponential rise of IDPs. Cities are thus facing multiple challenges of keeping pace with the influx – the largest and toughest wave of urban growth in history – to provide all that is needed for making them habitable, equitable and sustainable. 

Planned intervention needed

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has repeatedly said that the changes brought in by the climate crisis will influence migration patterns. “However, our level of awareness and understanding of how environmental factors affect migration, and how they also interact with other migration drivers such as demographic, political and economic conditions, has also changed. With enhanced knowledge, there is more incentive to act urgently, be prepared and respond.”

It is definitely a positive signal that governments across the globe have been growingly recognising the fact that there are people displaced by climate change.  Political awareness around environmental migration, as the UN says, has increased over the last decade and there is increased acceptance that this is a global challenge.  Nation states have signed the Paris Climate Change Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and most importantly the Global Compact for Migration. 

Our cities now need to integrate the challenge of IDPs in their plans and programmes.  While countries need to craft a special policy on IDPs and climate refugees, cities need to step up their planned interventions in this regard. 

The Global Compact for Migration suggests that the primary solution should be to allow people to stay in their homelands.  It’s only in extreme cases that new settlements be offered.  However, looking at the situation, as the number of such migrants keep growing and as most of them are expected to end up in cities, building IDP sensitive cities has become a new and urgent need. 

While accommodating the IDPs the cities have to plan their programmes in such manners that the water commons and other common spaces are not stressed further.  Provisioning of services in equitable and inclusive manner is important and makes a city real smart. Conserving the commons is equally smarter and makes the city’s path of growth sustainable.

This article was first published in Urban Update