Climate-driven displacements

Pakistan should create climate resilient towns within CPEC linked SEZs

Climate-caused disasters pose varied relief and rehabilitation challenges. Widespread displacement of people is one major challenge, which in turn is triggering climate-induced migrations within and across the borders of nation-states. Disasters do not differentiate between the rich and the poor.

While entire populations of villages and towns may be struck by climate-worsened flooding, for instance, economically vulnerable people still bear the brunt of such disasters.

This is because poorer people generally live in the most environmentally risky areas, and they have little resilience to bounce back after the loss of their livelihoods.

Consider the situation of smaller cultivators, landless sharecroppers, and daily waged agri-labourers in inundated rural areas of Pakistan at present who have lost standing crops and precious livestock, and now own no assets or resources to rebuild their lives.

These disenfranchised and displaced people have little reason to return home. Many internally displaced people thus find themselves migrating to thbigger cities to find alternative means to ensure household survival.

However, bigger cities in poorer countries like ours are hardly bustling with economic opportunities which can readily offer needed jobs for incoming migrants. Pakistani megacities like Karachi and Lahore have already been contending with years of rural migration and they are now bursting at the seams.

Limited resources and lack of foresight has led to haphazard urban development and the creation of large slum areas. Climate migrants pouring into these cities have little option but to try and find some space in unplanned slums, as their family members scramble to earn enough to survive.

Pakistan got a serious wake-up call to invest in climate-induced disaster preparedness after the super-floods back in 2010. Insufficient attention to this issue has led the current floods to cause even greater havoc.

The scale of the devastation and human suffering, being experienced in the country currently, demonstrates once again the folly of being short-sighted.

Instead of waiting for another disaster to strike, one hopes our policymakers will set aside their usual scramble for power to initiate necessary mitigation measures to deal with future climate-related disasters. Research on human security and human mobility challenges conducted via Georgetown University provides valid suggestions to contend with inevitable climate-induced displacements.

Some of these suggestions include the need for articulating universally accepted definitions for environmental migrants and climate refugees, and cooperating to deal with environmental displacements across national borders. This research also stresses the need for specific nations or regions within nations to serve as safe havens for environmental migrants.

The idea of creating climate refugee hubs, which can allow the flow of climate-induced displacements to be dealt with in a more organised manner, is not only an idea that rich countries have the luxury of implementing. Bangladesh, for instance, has already developed a town in the southwest of the country to host climate refugees.

Although Bangladesh has unfortunately been pushing Rohingya refuges from Myanmar to the environmentally vulnerable island known as Bhasan Char, it has adopted a more sensible approach to contend with its internal climate displacements.

Some 150,000 people now live in the once small town of Mongla, a majority of whom have come here from environmentally fraught villages around the Sundarbans. The country is now posed to replicate the Mongla model to dozens of other small coastal towns which, like Mongla, are adjacent to economic hubs such as sea and river ports.

These can, in turn, become migrant-friendly locations due to their sparse populations and the availability of economic opportunities. Why could Pakistan not create climate resilient towns like Mongla located in special economic zones being created under CPEC? Pakistan should reach out to China and discuss how this can be best done, given that China is looking for opportunities to help ‘green’ the BRI, of which CPEC is meant to be a flagship initiative.