"I'm Dead If I Stay, So It Doesn't Matter If I Die Along The Way"
The Amhara Plateau is no one’s idea of a gloomy landscape. Rich fields blossom as far as the eye can see; bountiful rivers zigzag through the region’s rolling hills. It isn’t hard to see why local Orthodox Christians believe the Ark of the Covenant was floated down the Nile from Egypt and ended up here. Nor why desert raiders continually stormed in off the nearby Sahara for hundreds of years.
But to those who farm the fertile reaches of Western Ethiopia, their home environment is growing a good deal less enticing by the day. Erratic temperatures and rains, which culminated last year in the total failure of the belg, the short rainy season, have struck locals hard. In a country still scarred by the deadly famines of the 1980s and 90s, reduced crop yields are panicking villagers, almost all of whom rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.
“The rains are very weak and in winter the cold is like nothing I’ve seen before,” said Barakat Daniel, gesturing at a mostly empty trench he uses to irrigate his teff crop on a muddy hillock just outside Bahir Dar. “It’s a hard life.” For some ambitious young men, conditions have long since crumbled to intolerable levels. They’ve tired of tilling land that’s become harder to farm as older farmers sub-divide their already small holdings into miniature plots for their many children. With population growth overwhelming meager services at the same time as intense weather plagues farmland, more and more people from the region appear to be following the example of refugees from violence-afflicted parts of Africa, and making a break for Europe.
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In 1990, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruption would displace up to 200 million migrants by 2050. And last year a World Bank study suggested that climate change will pitch at least 100 million people back into poverty, mostly in Africa, by 2030. A few Western governments have mooted plans to help struggling African countries counter the consequences of a changing climate. The UK’s Department for International Development, for one, gave £10 million (then about $15 million) in December to help Sudanese farmers boost their “resilience” and combat desertification. But with Europe already struggling to cope with the relatively small numbers of war refugees, it seems unlikely that current immigration policies will do much to dissuade climate migrants, many of whom feel they have nothing to lose. On my journey I often heard variations on a common refrain: “I’m dead if I stay, so it doesn’t matter if I die on the way.”
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http://qz.com/605609/the-climate-change-refugee-crisis-is-only-just-beginning/
