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Climate change
OpinionComment
Perry Q. Wood
Olivia Harms
Perry Q. WoodandOlivia Harms

Opinion | Europe is failing Asia-Pacific climate refugees by building bigger walls

  • There is an opportunity for Europe to lead the world in humanitarian responses and approaches to a crisis that is only going to grow
  • By choosing to hide behind political walls, the region is not only enacting economically counterproductive measures, it is pretending its obligations don’t exist

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People gather for a protest march against the construction of a refugee shelter in Upahl, Germany, on July 29. The anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany is a marked change from 2016, when the country welcomed more than a million refugees fleeing the war in Syria and other conflicts. Photo: DPA
Perry Q. WoodandOlivia Harms
The coming decades are likely to see the real cost of climate change on populations around the world, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet, as another migration season in Europe peaks, solutions from the region are not forthcoming.
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that an exponential increase in mass human displacement is imminent, with particularly devastating effects in Asia. The evidence supports this prediction.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which is part of the Norwegian Refugee Council, more than 225 million people across the Asia-Pacific region were displaced because of natural disasters between 2010 and 2021. The centre says that “weather-related hazards such as monsoon rains and tropical storms were responsible for 95 per cent of all disaster displacements” across the region.

The World Bank estimates there will be a further 89 million climate refugees from East Asia and the Pacific and Southeast Asia by 2050. While many will remain displaced within their home country, many others will make the perilous journey to Europe in search of a safe haven.

In the visa-free Schengen Area of the European Union, which incorporates 27 countries, the number of formal asylum seekers rose by 64 per cent in 2022. More than 880,000 people made first-time applications seeking protection in the EU last year, and that followed another sharp spike in applications in 2021.

Eurostat, the EU’s data agency, said almost half – 46 per cent – of the first-time asylum seekers in 2022 had Asian citizenship. That was by far the highest percentage of applicants among regions, with Africa the second-highest at 22 per cent.

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