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Podcast by UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition: When people move. Understanding how climate change creates the movement of people

Podcast by UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition: When people move. Understanding how climate change creates the movement of people.

Introduction

Climate change threatens to reshape the disasters we face. The podcast takes the listener to a range of different locations and to different types of disasters: from Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 which ended up displacing 4 million people, to the Horn of Africa where people still live in refugee camps after the year-long drought in the region in 2011.

Over the last two years, the UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition has collected testimonies from people who have moved as a result of climate-linked disasters. By exploring these stories we can begin to answer questions about how climate change is creating new patterns of migration and displacement. We can also begin to ask how life on a hotter planet might mean in terms of living with new kinds of disasters, and coping with the displacement they create. This podcast uses testimonies from Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and Mexico.

The narrator discusses similarities and differences between slow and fast onset disasters. Consider the two examples already mentioned:

1. Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda made landfall in the Philippines on the 8th of November. It had been identified as one of the most powerful typhoons ever recorded only hours before. In a few hours it had killed 6,000 people and injured nearly 30,000. The typhoon displaced 4 million. By 9th November, the storm had moved into Vietnam and China.

2. In July 2011, a severe drought hit the Horn of Africa that lasted almost a year. By September 2012, nearly a million people had fled Somalia to camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Early warning systems first forecast the looming disaster 11 months before it hit. The massive displacement was created partly by the fact the region had been made more vulnerable by a series of previous droughts

Listen to the podcast here

Other information

Narrator:

Alex Randall (Project Manager: UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition for COIN)

COIN (Climate Outreach and Information Network) is a ‘think and do’ tank focused on connecting people to climate change and climate change to people. COIN will change their name to Climate Outreach as of September 2015.

Programme credits:

Music: Chris Zabriskie Cover Images: Henry Donati/Department for International Development Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0) and Russell Watkins / Department for International Development. Testimonies:

Phillipines: Reuters Foundation

Pakistan: Aljazeera and CDKN

Horn of Africa: UNHCR / UNU

Mexico: EACH-FOR Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios. Mexico case study report.

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