Faced With Rising Temperatures, People May Seek Asylum (axios.com)

Europe is already struggling to absorb an influx of refugees from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa. Germany alone has taken in more than a million people since 2015. This wave of immigration has led to political upheaval, with the rise of right-wing political parties in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Hungary, among others. Now a new study, published in the journal Science, shows that the current surge in refugees may just be a preview of what's to come due in large part to global warming. From a report: At an average growing season temperature of about 68 Fahrenheit, which is the optimum one for agriculture, the number of applications for asylum was lowest. As the average temperature rose, so did the number of people from Somalia, Bangladesh and other warmer climate countries seeking asylum. But when cooler countries -- such as Serbia and Peru -- got warmer, fewer applications were received. The acceptance rate for asylum application to the EU is less than 10%. But when there was a spike in applications tied to weather fluctuations, the admittance rate rose to about 30%, suggesting agencies who evaluate the applicants find their cause worthy.

Comments

Suspicious reasoning

[SuperKendall]

Is it really climate that drives people from Somalia or Bangladesh? Or is it instead the fact those countries are pretty unstable and people want to get to a more stable area?

Especially if you are talking refugees, and not simply immigration requests. "Refugee" implies something catastrophic they are fleeing, not slightly warmer weather.

Re:Context would be useful

[hey!]

Actually this is a good point, but you're presupposing that these two causes of refugee flight are mutually exclusive. In fact they work synergistically. Environmental stress creates economic disruption, creating political unrest, encouraging people predisposed to fight oppressive governments rebel. That in turn prompting oppressive responses which exacerbate the underlying crisis and further erode the regime's credibility. This takes resources and focus away from the response to the underlying disaster, and in any case the inevitable favoritism and corruption push the regime to the brink of collapse.

Take Syria, a perfect storm scenario. It's had a horrifically brutal, but *stable* regime for decades. A multi-year drought depopulated the countryside, further reducing its own agricultural output and creating large urban concentrations of unemployed young men ripe for radicalization. Then a transient spike in global wheat prices created shortages of subsidized bread and huge price spikes in market prices. This was

It's hard to say how much better an honest and generally popular Syrian government would have weathered the crisis, but this much is clear: while oppressive governments *can* produce refugees on their own, they don't necessarily do so. But put a country where people hate and fear their government under stress, and you'll get refugees.