No such thing as climate refugees? Why Global North ignores Africa’s most vulnerable—but must stop
Photo: Rhino Refugee Camp, Arua, Uganda. Source: Ninno JackJr, unsplash.com, CC Lincense
The year 2024 was politically marked by a radical yet expected right turn in the Global North—a tendency that can be fairly expected to continue in the years to come. The far-right made striking gains across the continent during the European parliamentary and national elections, while the United States has effectively made a choice in favor of Project 2025. The anti-immigration agenda found itself at the heart of the electoral platforms of the far-right in multiple countries. With the weakening centrist powers—fairly blamed for the deterioration in living conditions of the middle and lower class—the years to come promise further normalisation of the radical right’s anti-immigration narratives and policies.
While the connection between these trends is evident in general terms of the capital’s hegemony and the nation states guarding the said capital, there is more to it. There are hundreds of millions of people who will in the upcoming future lose their homes and, in some cases, even countries due to capitalism's harm to the climate. The exact same people will simultaneously have less and less opportunities to find refuge, especially in the wealthier countries of the Global North, and the international system remains designed to ensure this.
How many people are affected by climate change in Africa?
While there is no definitive figure for the number of climate refugees in Africa today, projections offer insight into the scale of the crisis. The Africa Climate Mobility Initiative estimates internal climate mobility to be between 95 and 113 million people by 2050, depending on future emissions. Cross-border migration is also expected to rise, with climate change potentially driving up to 10% of Africa’s population to seek refuge abroad.
Climate mobility hotspots are already emerging across Africa, including regions between Niger and Nigeria, around Lake Victoria, and in the Horn of Africa. In countries like Rwanda and Ethiopia, farmers are abandoning rain-fed lowlands for pastoral lands, while coastal areas face the displacement of up to 2.5 million people by 2050 due to rising sea levels, flooding, and other climate stressors.
At the heart of Africa’s climate crisis lies an existential threat: food security. In war-torn Sudan, erratic rainfall and prolonged droughts have deepened food insecurity, which UN experts describe as the worst famine crisis in modern history—further exacerbated by warring parties weaponizing hunger by blocking humanitarian aid, sieges, or targeting agricultural production. In Zimbabwe, severe droughts are drying up water sources, leaving poor households struggling to sustain both livestock and crops.
Climate-driven food insecurity is also fueling armed conflicts across the region. In particular, competition over dwindling land resources has intensified deadly disputes between farmers and herders, disrupting traditional migratory patterns and escalating intercommunal violence to unprecedented levels. Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) links over 15,000 deaths to farmer-herder conflicts in West and Central Africa since 2010, with more than half occurring since 2018. In Nigeria, where two-thirds of herders belong to the Fulani ethnic group while most farmers come from other backgrounds, farmer-herder clashes have killed and displaced thousands.
The most vulnerable communities bear the brunt of climate-driven violence and displacement. In Malawi, for example, prolonged El Niño-induced droughts have affected 5.7 million people, with women and children disproportionately impacted. As Faith Phiri, Director of the Gender Empowerment Network (GENET), explains, “Drought and food scarcity in Malawi expose women and girls to rising risks of gender-based violence, early marriage, malnutrition, and barriers to education.”
What does Europe (and others) have to do with it?
Africa’s population hence finds itself facing a variety of climate-induced existential threats created by the Global North – the wealthy part of the world that also does not cease to exploit the region. But for ever-growing extractivist activities and displacement of traditional agricultural systems leading to deterioration of soil fertility and increased desertification across the continent, extra regional actors are also responsible for land grabs.
Such large-scale land acquisitions are some of the most straightforward illustrations of how neocolonialism exacerbates climate change and contributes to the displacement of local populations, creating climate refugees. Land grabbing returned to global headlines in late 2023 when Blue Carbon, a Gulf-based firm that brokers carbon offsets, was reported to have snapped up some 25 million hectares of land in five African countries, covering up to 20% of land in case of Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, watchdogs point out that Blue Carbon’s land grab in Liberia project violates land rights, affecting the livelihood of over a million people. On top of that, according to the memorandum of understanding the company signed with Liberia, Blue Carbon would receive 70% of revenues from the sale of carbon credits, leaving the government only 30%—local NGOs labeled the agreement as carbon colonialism.
Not that long ago, back in 2008, when the economic crisis and accompanying biofuel rush in Europe kicked off the wave of mega land grabs by European – German, Dutch and Swedish – companies as well. 15 years on, land grabs are escalating in new and dangerous forms that the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems called a “multi-dimensional land squeeze.”
The cases of Ethiopia’s remote Gambella region and Lower Omo valley demonstrate how turning an area into commercial agricultural investment centres – by the foreign capital and accommodating national policies – ruins local communities. The Ethiopian government deprives small-scale farmers, pastoralists and indigenous people of arable farmland, water access, fishing and hunting grounds in favour of corporations, claiming the move would resolve the nation’s food crisis. Watchdogs argue that such activity “produces no benefits to local communities, but exposes them to extreme poverty, food insecurity,” while indigenous people affected by the land grabs have provided accounts of tactics used against them, including threats, unlawful arrests and imprisonment, sexualised violence, torture and other forms of assaults.
A less evident illustration of how the former colonial powers continue to exploit the region at the expense of climate threat is Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) sponsored by the neoliberal institutes like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and imposed on African countries in the 1980 – 1990s. Designed to promote countries’ ability to manage their external debt through austerity, liberalisation and privatisation, the programs prioritise extractivist export-oriented economies and steal financial and administrative capacity from environmental governance. In Ghana, SAPs programs are considered one of the drivers of the country’s deforestation through timber extraction and conversion of forestland to crop farming, particularly cocoa farming.
“Industrialized nations in the Global North hold a significant historical responsibility for the climate crisis,” noted in a comment to September Edwin Mumbere, Director of Centre for Citizens Conserving Environment & Management (CECIC), adding that “the carbon emissions that drive global warming have predominantly originated from high-income countries, yet it is the Global South that suffers the most evidenced by floods in South Sudan, prolonged droughts in Kenya, and devastating landslides in Uganda.”
The expert highlighted that despite years of climate negotiations, financial “commitments from the Global North have consistently fallen short,” citing the $100 billion annual climate finance pledge made at COP15 in 2009 that [until recently] remained unfulfilled, with only a small portion reaching frontline communities. “While advocating for Africa’s transition to renewable energy, Global North countries continue to approve new fossil fuel projects,” added Mumbere.
It comes as no surprise that developing nations blasted the new $300 billion COP29 climate deal adopted in Baku in 2024 as insufficient, arguing that financial responsibility over the worsening situation in climate-vulnerable countries lies on the industrialised nations.
Even powers that claim to be an alternative to old colonialist models continue to engage in the same extractivist and exploitative deals, further deepening Africa’s climate crisis. Russia is a case in point: its officials emphasize Moscow’s historical support for anticolonial movements while the Kremlin positions itself as a supposed champion of the Global South.
At the same time, Russia is among the many external players treating Africa as a resource hub to be carved up for profit: whether through oil and gas exploration from Algeria to Angola, extractivist mining of diamonds, bauxites, cobalt and other minerals or grey schemes that allow the companies associated with the Wagner PMC to conduct timber business in the Central African Republic or illicit gold trading.
Already rich in resources, Russia exploits cheap labor and weak environmental regulations, treating African countries as little more than sacrifice zones for the Kremlin. But beyond economic motives, geostrategic interests also drive its actions—securing regional footholds, displacing Western influence, and expanding support for Moscow on the global stage. These incentives have only intensified amid Russia’s relative international isolation following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine: Russia’s highly publicized supply of free grain to its closest African partners serves as yet another example of how states manipulate climate-driven food insecurity for political gain.
Legal void of refugee status
The combination of the capitalism-driven climate change and continued exploitation of the region is destroying livelihoods, forcing vulnerable communities into the precarious pursuit of asylum under an international system that refuses to recognize them as refugees. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as an individual prosecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, who finds themselves outside of their country of nationality and are unable or unwilling to return due to the fear of prosecution. Climate refugees do not fall under the definition for a variety of reasons, but primarily because persecution is not considered a factor in their displacement.
“Media are pushing again and again for features on ‘climate refugees’ and request projections on how many climate refugees there will be in twenty years,” read the 2019 article by Dina Ionesco, Head of the Migration, Environment and Climate Change (MECC) Division at IOM, for the UN. Ionesco cited “some emblematic small island States” that argue that their population does not seek to be labeled as refugees as “they want to be able to stay in their homes, or to move in dignity and through regular channels without abandoning everything behind.” The claim seems peculiar considering that any other forced migrants would like to either not leave their homes or move in dignity instead of being among the thousands drowning in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean and enter Europe.
Ionesco continues her point against the climate refugees status by saying that it overlooks key aspects of climate-driven migration. The author claims that “climate migration is not necessarily forced”, while “opening the 1951 Refugee Convention might weaken the refugee status”. Here, overburdened asylum systems and states’ lack of interest in taking responsibility for displaced people are hence presented as a norm.
However, existing international law already offers a broader definition of refugees. The 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, adopted by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), expands the 1951 definition to include those fleeing external aggression, occupation, foreign domination, or events seriously disturbing public order in their country. While the document does not explicitly mention climate refugees, as demonstrated above, extreme weather events—such as droughts, desertification, or floods—can disrupt public order.
Beyond legal frameworks, international practice supports the idea that individuals displaced by climate change should have the right to seek refuge. A case in point is the Horn of Africa drought of 2011–2012, when Kenya alone took in approximately 370,000 Somalis fleeing famine.
Still, there is truth in Ionesco’s words: the international refugee system is failing, and simply expanding legal definitions will not solve the crisis. The late Gil Loescher, a political scientist and expert in forced migration, recognized refugee protection as an inherently political issue and emphasized the need to democratize the international regimes governing it. Similar to the case of Ethiopia’s Gambella region and Lower Omo Valley, refugees often have little to no say in the laws and policies that dictate their survival.
Speaking to September, Edwin Mumbere noted that the political shift to the right across the Global North is pushing climate refugees into increasingly hostile environments.
“Without immediate international intervention, we risk creating a future where millions find themselves stranded, unable to return home yet unwelcome elsewhere.”
He stressed that short-term humanitarian aid is not enough—addressing this crisis requires a fundamental reevaluation of migration policies, climate finance strategies, and geopolitical accountability.
For now, the world watches as capitalism and exploitative global policies drive a deepening polycrisis, displacing millions. Yet, the very nations most responsible for climate change fortify their borders and harden their asylum systems, ensuring climate refugees remain trapped in limbo.
This is not failure but design—a system built on inequality, protecting wealth at the expense of human lives. Lacking legal recognition, climate refugees are abandoned to starve, drown, or endure unlivable conditions with no hope of dignity. With or without acknowledgment, the next refugee crisis is already here.