Climate change could leave you homeless overnight – right here, in Europe.
Flash floods, mudslides and wildfires triggered by heatwaves are among the extreme weather events becoming increasingly common, thanks to climate change.
Those who lose their homes and livelihoods in these disasters run the risk of being displaced, and becoming climate migrants – just like Iris, or Anne and Jean or Álvaro, Magdalena, Ana and Zekira or Julie and Chris, the people you will meet throughout this series of articles and videos. People whose stories have so far remained unreported.
“It’s a reality in Europe, not something that will happen in centuries,” says Dina Ionesco, who leads the work being done on migration and climate change at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Environmental migrants are persons or groups of persons who, predominantly for reasons of sudden or progressive change in the environment that adversely affects their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad
IOM (2011:33)

To find Europe’s environmental migrants, we travelled to the countries that have seen the highest number of displacements due to climate events on the continent, according to data provided by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC): Bosnia and Herzegovina, Spain,France and Germany.

We also went to Moldova – ranked as the most climate-vulnerable country in Europe – and to Portugal, the European country with the highest annual number of wildfires since 2015.

“Disaster displacement is very much a global phenomenon, even in high- income countries like the ones in Europe,” says Alexandra Bilak, director of the IDMC. More extreme weather events, more dangerous, more often

Climate events causing displacement in Europe have more than doubled in the last four years, from 43 in 2016 to 100 in 2019. By February 2020, four storms – Gloria, Brendan, Ciara and Dennis – had already wreaked havoc on the continent’s northern and western coasts.

The science is abundantly clear – climate change aggravates extreme weather events, making them deadlier and increasing the chance of them becoming more widespread. “Our climate projections show that the events that we are now classifying as extreme will become more frequent in the future. They will become the new normal,'' says Gianmaria Sannino, head of the Climate Modelling Laboratory at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA). Every number hides a human story
700,000 displacements in Europe in the last decade
For every disaster in Europe that becomes a database entry, there are people who have lost everything. Most manage to rebuild their homes and return. But some are not as lucky.

Statistics show there are more heatwaves in Spain now than ever before. In the last five years, they have lasted an average of 15 days each. Between 1975 and 2014, Spanish heatwaves typically lasted for about five days.
The 2009 UN convention to combat desertification found that migrants also tend to underestimate climate as a factor in their situation. Most explain their displacement in terms of poverty, often overlooking the root cause behind the deterioration of their homes and land, and the resulting loss of productivity.
Numbers like these become the backdrop for stories of people like Álvaro García Río-Miranda. Read the whole article by following the link above: