It is expected to make the world hotter, rainfall more intense, and result in more extreme weather events such as droughts, storms and floods. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)2 in 1990 noted that the greatest single impact of climate change could be on 1human migration, causing population movements by making certain parts of the world much less viable places to live. Nicholas Stern wrote that “Greater resource scarcity, desertification, risks of droughts and floods, and rising sea-levels could drive many millions of people to migrate”. 3

1 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) (2014a) ‘Summary for Policymakers’, in Field, C., Barros, V. et al. (eds), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nowadays we can understand that events such as drought, floods, natural catastrophes (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions), and epidemics are a result of human action and decision-making processes, but in the past, they were perceived as 'fatality' and 'punishment from God'. Some people may say that the displacement because of climate aspects has started long time ago, one classic example is the Mesopotamian and Egyptian societies that emerged as people migrated away from desiccating rangelands and into riverine areas.

Data from the IDMC say that, at the end of 2019, around 5.1 million people in 95 countries and territories were living in displacement as a result of disasters that happened not only in 2019, but also in previous years. 4 The countries with the highest number of internally displaced persons were Afghanistan (1.2 million); India (590,00); Ethiopia (390,00), Philippines (364,00) and Sudan (272,000). The migration caused by the human-indeed climate change is predicted to increase and to vary between 200 million and 1 billion from 2010 to 2050.5 UN estimates that the number of people migration in reason of climate changes will be higher than the official politic refugees and asylum seekers number.