Activists are calling on the United States to issue humanitarian visas to allow migrants to get refugee status to “temporarily” reside in the country after Biden administration issued report claiming climate change is causing the mass migration and forcing people out of their homes and communities.
The “Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration,” says that conflicts and extreme weather events are the top two drivers of forced displacement globally and that these drivers share strong correlation and that are responsible for the annual displacement of nearly 30 million people.
In the absence of effective prevention efforts, extreme weather events further stress vulnerable communities, increasing the risk of conflict and displacement, and also pose increased risk to marginalized communities displaced by conflict stemming from the impacts of climate change.
The activists’ calls now are for the US to allow “climate change refugees” through the issuance of special visas with the International Refugee Assistance Project’s Ama Francis, who works on climate displacement pointing to climate migration as a pressing problem likely to become an ongoing crisis,
In an interview with NPR, she quoted the UN estimates that tens of millions of people will be forced to move away from their homes in coming decades, underlying that climate-related and other environmental disasters displace three times more people than conflicts within the same countries.
By some predictions, as Francis says, the US this decade will have about 13 million people on the move because of just sea level rise, reminding also to the fact that indigenous communities in the US were also forced to relocate internally due of the existential threat they were facing from climate change impacts.
Francis, who advocates for special visas, stressed the need of a climate-humanitarian visa that would enable people from a climate-vulnerable region that find it really hard to sustain life where they are because of climate impacts, to come and seek shelter in the US.
She points that the US should define a set of climate vulnerable countries whose citizens would be off the bat eligible for the special visas.
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