Climate change has become a global challenge and a real risk for many countries.
Climate changes have palpable effects in more and more places around the world.
The scientific evidence leaves little room for doubt.
Nor does it seem that the impact of climate change on people's mobility can be easily questioned.
According to the Groundswell
report
(2021), published by the World Bank, it is estimated that 251 million could leave their countries due to climate change before the year 2050.
Within the African continent, Senegal is a good example of the effects that climate change can have on migration.
Through the research project
Migration, climate change and development cooperation
We have been able to verify some of them.
The study has allowed us to better understand the complexity of the link between climate change and mobility.
In reality, climate change has numerous implications and migrations are due to multiple factors that are not always obvious.
For example, in certain cases climate change can push people to emigrate.
On the other hand, in others, climate change may impoverish the population to the point that emigration itself becomes difficult.
Climate change has not yet clearly and directly pushed for large-scale emigration, but it has come to destabilize an already fragile terrain.
Senegal is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change.
According to the University of Notre Dame (USA), Senegal was ranked 137th in terms of its climate vulnerability in 2021, when the most vulnerable country in the world, Chad, was ranked 185th. Senegal is also an important focus of emigration. International: the Migration Data Portal statistical base indicates that in 2020 there were 693,800 Senegalese abroad.
However, neither phenomenon is new for the population of this African country, which has been adapting to difficult environmental conditions for a long time.
The Senegalese have also emigrated for many decades and have integrated mobility into their culture and way of life.
In fact, emigration itself is now considered a strategy for adaptation to environmental changes and climate variability.
Who emigrates?
Senegal's farmers (men and women) are well aware of the lack of water and the advance of desertification.
The lands are increasingly arid and become unproductive.
Shepherds are also finding it increasingly difficult to find pasture for their flocks, moving to other places with the risk of inter-community conflicts.
Those who make their living from fishing—the men who go fishing and the women who prepare and sell the fish—reluctant to abandon a declining livelihood.
The threats to fishing come from the warming of the sea and the alteration of currents, but above all from overfishing by foreign fleets.
Now catches are reduced, costs are increasing and fishing activity is no longer profitable.
All of this means that among the Senegalese emigration to Spain and other countries there are farmers, shepherds and fishermen, although they are not always the most numerous.
A good part of the Senegalese diaspora is made up of urban young people who have not been able to finish their secondary or university studies, or who have not found a suitable job after completing their training.
The lack of job expectations, along with the growing limitation of freedoms, makes young people think that it will be difficult for them to see their personal projects fulfilled.
In this context, climate change has become another stressor.
By driving those who have seen their living systems in the towns altered to the cities, urban centers suffer from saturation and a deficit of basic services.
Large cities, like Dakar, are experiencing uncontrolled growth that makes the living conditions of the entire population precarious.
And the same thing is happening in other African countries.
Climate change has not yet clearly and directly pushed for large-scale emigration, but it has come to destabilize an already fragile terrain.
This is not about generating unnecessary alarm in the face of migration that is sufficiently problematic in the receiving countries.
The main issue is to understand the changes and promote policies that anticipate some of the effects and mitigate others.
As we already know, closing borders does not serve to prevent emigration, only to make it more expensive and more dramatic.
Turning a blind eye to climate change may be even more costly and dangerous.
Joan Lacomba Vazquez
is a professor at the Department of Social Work at the University of Valencia.
This article was previously published on
The Conversation.
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