Europe’s refugee crisis: a taste of things to come? — Medium
▻https://medium.com/@UNEnvironment/europe-s-refugee-crisis-a-taste-of-things-to-come-72a5d4079cb4
When you look to the root causes of migration, more often than not environmental change or mismanagement is in there somewhere. The Syrian civil war, while clearly not directly triggered by environmental factors, may have been made more likely by the severe drought that struck the country between 2006 and 2009. This drought, which some suggest may be the worst to hit the region in 900 years, forced thousands of rural farmers to abandon their villages and move to urban centres, thus swelling the country’s cities and putting pressure on jobs and resources. As US Secretary of State John Kerry said in 2015: “I’m not telling you that the crisis in Syria was created by climate change. But the devastating drought clearly made a bad situation a lot worse.”
Meanwhile, since 2008 an average of 26.4 million people have been displaced from their homes each year by disasters brought on by natural hazards. This is the equivalent to one person every second.