Climate Migration: A silent crisis gaining momentum in Latin America

One of the most challenging realities facing humanity is climate change, and Latin America is among the most vulnerable regions due to its limited capacity to adapt and respond.

What were once distant tales of drought or flooding are now everyday stories. Entire families pack up what little they have left, children drop out of school because there's no more water, and ancestral communities disappear from the map after a hurricane or a drying up river. Climate migration is already here, yet we continue to treat it as a problem of the future.

The numbers are increasingly alarming and, in many cases, ignored. The World Bank estimates that, by 2050, 17 million Latin Americans could be forced to move within their countries due to climate-related causes. But the displaced are closer than we imagine: they are the farmers of the Central American Dry Corridor, where harvests have been cut in half in the last decade; they are the fishermen of Chiloé, Chile, whose beaches are disappearing due to coastal erosion; and they are the Wayúu indigenous people in La Guajira, who walk for days in search of a water well.

In 2020, Hurricanes Eta and Iota not only devastated entire towns in Honduras and Nicaragua, but also provided a lesson in the suddenness and devastation of climate change. Half a million people were displaced, many of them crammed into cities that could no longer absorb more population, exacerbating their environmental, social, political, and economic problems.

One of the most critical aspects of this crisis is the lack of legal recognition for climate migrants. Currently, there is no international protection for those forced to flee due to environmental disasters. Unlike political refugees, climate-displaced people lack legal status that guarantees them rights and assistance. While Europe debates agreements to relocate those affected by natural disasters, in Latin America the issue remains unclear and unclear. How many governments have incorporated climate displacement into their migration policies? Almost none.

Even more worrying is the lack of preparedness of cities to receive these migrants. Latin America faces a problem that is growing faster than its urban capacity: 30% of its population already lives in precarious settlements (UN-Habitat, 2023), and thousands more arrive each year, driven by droughts, floods, and hurricanes.

The numbers speak for themselves: Lima, a desert city, receives 40,000 climate migrants annually, while 40% of its population struggles to access water (INEI, 2023). Bogotá faces the pressure of 1.2 million displaced people and a housing shortage of 320,000 (UNHCR, 2023). Mexico City, meanwhile, is sinking as it absorbs farmers from dry areas, extracting 60% of its water from overexploited sources (UNAM, 2023).

The result is an explosive cocktail: 80% of these migrants end up in slums, 25% of their youth are recruited by gangs, and 60% of social conflicts are related to resource scarcity. Latin American cities aren't waiting for the climate impact: they're already feeling the effects. The question is how much longer they can withstand it.

Action is urgent. Legal recognition processes for the temporary protection of climate-displaced people, funding for adaptation, risk prevention, and management, and policies that prioritize the human rights of those who have lost their homes due to climate change are needed.

Latin America has a choice: act now with clear policies or wait for the climate crisis to become the largest humanitarian catastrophe in our region. The time to decide is now.

Source: Angie Tatiana Ortega Ramírez, professor in the Chemical Engineering program at the University of America.