The climate crisis displaced almost a million people last year, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization. To learn more about the impact of the climate crisis, and what role governments play, TaiwanPlus spoke with Mucahid Bayrak, associate professor of geography at National Taiwan Normal University.
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00:00According to data from the World Meteorological Organization, there's an
00:04increasing number of unusual or unprecedented extreme weather events.
00:09What's causing these? So according to the recent reports, extreme weather
00:15events, especially unusual weather events, have been increasing significantly. But
00:22we have to be careful to attribute all of these extreme weather events to
00:26climate change, because a lot of extreme weather events, such as flooding or
00:29negative impacts related to typhoon damage, and so on, it's also related to
00:37other issues, such as bad government planning, flood infrastructure, or, you
00:42know, over-urbanization and other factors. We cannot simply blame climate change
00:48for people being vulnerable. Being vulnerable, it's also an outcome of
00:52existing inequalities. It's also an outcome of political decisions made by
00:59relevant governments, or just by unequal power relations in society. And what
01:04better choices can governments make to prevent the global climate crisis from
01:09worsening? Well, governments need to take accountability. Accountability in the
01:14sense of, if a community has been struck by severe flooding, or have been struck
01:20by an extreme weather event or extreme climate events, then they take
01:24accountability in which they try to investigate or identify where were their
01:30shortcomings. Some communities are more at risk of flooding because that has
01:35been a political decision. You will see that the most wealthy parts of that city
01:39are not having flood risk at all. So you can ask yourself the question why that's
01:44the case. So an example would be the area that's called the Shih Tzu Dao, which is
01:50part of Taipei's flood zone. A lot of people in Shih Tzu Dao are aging, are
01:56marginalized, have a lower socioeconomic status. And throughout history that
02:02probably explains why they are at the flood zone of Taipei. The World
02:07Meteorological Organization's State of the Climate report shows that extreme
02:12weather events in 2024 displaced a record number of people. So what is a
02:18climate refugee? And is this even a useful term? We have to be very careful
02:23when we label someone as a climate refugee, because then we are also
02:27shifting away the responsibility of why some people tend to move in the first
02:32place. Look, if we talk about displacement, that's a different thing.
02:36If there's a huge flooding, you're not able to stay, you move out. Flooding
02:40might not be necessarily caused by climate change, but it might be exacerbated
02:45by climate change. But if we really talk about the doom scenarios of billions of
02:50climate refugees knocking on the doors of the West because they want to be let
02:55in, then I would say, well, that's an extreme simplification of a very complex
02:59situation, which many rural and local communities, especially in the global
03:05South, face every day. Because I'm not saying they're not facing the negative
03:09impacts of climate change, but the reasons why people migrate are very
03:14complicated and are structured by many different factors, including the global
03:19economy, including people's personal desires, including globalization,
03:24including industrialization of countries. So what I would like to argue for is to
03:29bring politics back into discussions on the climate crisis, on discussions on
03:34climate refugees and on discussions on what constitutes a negative impact of
03:40climate change, because politics plays a very important role here as well.