By Fernanda de Salles Cavedon-Capdeville and Erika Pires Ramos*

A farmer works a field in Nicaragua, one of the Central American countries experiencing increasing drought over the last two decades/ Neil Palmer/ Wikimedia Commons/ Creative Commons License

Latin America – one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change worldwide – is already experiencing dire consequences, including the displacement of millions of people, but the region has been slow to share the information needed for comprehensive strategies.

• In 1998-2017, among the 10 countries most affected by climate risks in the world, five were in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Global Climate Risk Index 2019. Extreme events and disasters are increasing in the region. Out of 335 disasters registered globally in 2017, 93 took place in the Americas. Rapid-onset events, such as hurricanes, have been taking a progressively greater toll. In 2016, 17.3 percent of people affected by disasters lived in the region, far more than the average of 5.1 percent in the previous five years.

Changes in climate variability and in extreme events have severely affected the region. Over 1998-2017, Latin America was the continent with the highest economic losses due to climate-related disasters, representing 53 percent of the global figure, according to studies. The impact on people is aggravated by the high vulnerability and low adaptive capacity caused by poverty and economic inequality. Countries in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere subtropics are also projected to experience the largest impact on economic growth.

• These economic, political, cultural and social factors – along with extreme-weather events and other effects of climate change, such as desertification and rising sea levels, combine to be a major cause of displacement in Latin America. Colombia, Chile, Haiti and Brazil joined the list of the 20 countries with the highest number of people displaced by disasters from 2008 to 2014.
• More recently, 4.5 million people in the Americas were displaced by disasters in 2017, representing 23.8 percent of the global total. Three major hurricanes that year displaced over 3 million people, and floods throughout South America also drove many thousands from their homes that year. In 2018, 1.7 million people were displaced by disasters in the Americas. Another 2.5 million people were affected by drought that year in Central America, including migration hotspots Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Oxfam has highlighted that climate change – and the consequent loss of crops and food security – is increasingly a driver of migration in the Dry Corridor of Central America.

Experts at the World Bank and elsewhere estimate that slow-onset climate change events in Latin America alone could displace 17 million people by 2050. This and similar estimates are sound – and underscore the urgent need for action – but data on the impact of slow-onset events is difficult to get and, in general, data related to climate-induced human mobility has gaps. These information challenges will increasingly complicate efforts to deal with the problems of migration driven by climate change. There is also a lack of specific information about the climate laws, policies. strategies, and measures that governments will need to take to avert, minimize and best address the economic and human ravages the region is likely to experience.

• The South American Network for Environmental Migration (RESAMA) is a regional independent network of experts and researchers developing and disseminating information on environmental migration and related topics, and promoting ways to enhance its inclusion in regional and national agendas. RESAMA, in partnership with the University for Peace (UPEACE) in Costa Rica, has designed the Latin-American Observatory on Human Mobility, Climate Change and Disasters (MOVE-LAM) to map, understand and address the topic in the region. The observatory intends to evolve into a regional hub to simplify and share information — transforming scientific knowledge into accessible and practical information available to actors and other stakeholders. It’s a huge task, but the challenges the hemisphere faces demand it.

February 10, 2020

*Fernanda de Salles Cavedon-Capdeville is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianópolis, Brazil, and a RESAMA researcher.

*Erika Pires Ramos has a PhD in International Law from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is founder of RESAMA.