Andrej Bojic: Climate change may lead to forced migration of over 140M people

According to a study by the European Institute for Security Studies, in 2019, more than 24 million people had to flee their homes as a result of natural disasters, former vice-president of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, member of the COP Bureau Andrej Bojic told Report.

Such events will become more frequent and more destructive in the future unless sustainable measures are taken to mitigate the effects of extreme climate events, he said.

“The World Bank estimates that by 2050, as a result of climate change, more than 140 million people could become internally displaced in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

Climate change in these areas can produce as many as seven risks: local competition for resources, insecurity in terms of arable land and migration, weather disasters, large oscillations in the price of food, transnational conflicts in terms of water management, sea level rise and coastal degradation as well as inadequate effects of climate policies.

The loss of conditions for life, starting with drinking water, through arable land, and all the way to a roof over the head, entails the displacement of the population in the form of migrations with all its security consequences,” he noted.

“Migration has become the main topic of all political campaigns in Europe, and the issue of migrants is one of the main security issues within the states.

I believe that the time ahead may show that most of these people have left their homelands because, due to the devastating effects of climate change, their poor countries, often ravaged by wars, have become even poorer with no hope of recovery in the foreseeable future, because they no longer exist weather, climate preconditions for that.”