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One in every 69 people, or 1.5 per cent of the world’s population, is now forcibly displaced — nearly double the number of people displaced a decade ago, a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released on July 15, 2024, pointed out. Forced displacement is now reported as the highest on record in the modern age, with women and girls being affected the most.
Apart from conflicts and violence, climate change has been the most dominant reason for the forced displacement of people, whose homes become unfit for human habitation due to climate-induced extreme conditions such as wildfires, flooding, poor air quality, intolerable heat, and/or the aftermath of prolonged conflict.
The report defined habitability as a characteristic of environments that support human safety, resilient livelihoods, people’s capacity to adapt to risk, and sustainable intergenerational development.
Habitability has five pillars: Land, freshwater, food, settlement and infrastructure, and economic and subsistence activities. Rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and rising sea levels threaten the future availability of habitable environments.
“Large-scale relocation of entire communities become the norm,” the report, titled, Navigating New Horizons-A global foresight report on planetary health and wellbeing, said as it pointed out out the grim reality of climate induced displacement over borders and across continents.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change.
Climate-induced human migration and displacement affected certain regions and their populations more than others, with some countries in Africa, Central America, the Pacific Islands and South Asia more at risk than other regions.
India is one of the nine countries where the trend of extreme temperatures and climate-related disasters has triggered an unprecedented surge in large-scale, prolonged, and repeated displacements in the last two years. Other countries include Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, China, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, and Kenya.
The report brought up a recent modelling study that predicted that up to three billion people could be living comfortably outside of climate conditions (particularly temperature) that have served humanity for the past 6,000 years.
Worse, certain regions will be affected by 2070 if no climate mitigation or migration occurs. Northern South America, Central Africa, India, and northern Australia could all become too hot to support human life.
While temperate regions of the world are unlikely to become uninhabitable due to temperature alone, extreme conditions such as food shortages, wildfires, and intolerable low air quality may eventually render some densely populated urban and rural areas prohibitively dangerous.
It also quoted projections from the International Organization for Migration that suggested between 25 million and 1 billion people could become environmental migrants by 2050.
“Human mobility and migration have long been a driver of development and innovation. But in a world characterised by multiple crises—economic, conflicts and disasters—the magnitude and character of these crises have changed over time and are among the most important phenomena this century,” the UN report said.
While the number of internally displaced persons remains a relatively small proportion of the global population (71.4 million), in two decades, this number has risen by 340 per cent. Another report released in May had detected disaster-induced internal displacement in 148 countries and territories in 2023, with significant events across six continents.
Climate-related disasters have been displacing more people than conflict and violence, but the trend was reversed in 2022-23. According to new data from the IOM, 10.7 million people were displaced by conflicts in Sudan, nine million of whom were internally displaced.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, over 1.9 million people (85 per cent of the population) became internally displaced in less than 150 days, with their homes, amenities, and support networks completely unreachable, even if they had only moved a few miles.