Climate Change Drove Nepali Workers to Qatar to Build the World Cup Stadiums. It Also Made Their Jobs More Dangerous
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
When the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration predicts that as many as a billion people will be displaced by climate change over the next 30 years, it’s easy to picture entire communities uprooted by catastrophic hurricanes or swept away by epic floods made more likely by global warming, as we saw in the U.S. and Pakistan earlier this year. But climate-change-induced migration is just as likely to look like the southern Nepali village of Nagrain, where an increasingly unpredictable monsoon has led to droughts, floods, and heatwaves that make it nearly impossible to feed a family by farming the land. Local elders estimate that more than half the town’s men have left to work abroad, largely heading to Qatar and the Gulf countries in search of salaries to send home to their families. Approximately 3.5 million Nepalis (14% of total population) are working abroad today, up from 220,000 in 2008. And while climate is not driving all the migration, it is playing an increasingly important role. “Climate change is encouraging people to go to the Gulf for work,” says Surya Narayan Sah, a social worker from Nagrain. “Here we depend on the rain to farm, and when it is irregular, there is no food, so they have to buy it, and the only way to earn cash is to go abroad.”
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Labor migration can be an adaptive solution for climate change, but only if it...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Aryn Baker / Doha, Qatar and Nagrain, Nepal Tags: Uncategorized adaptation climate change Climate Is Everything Londontime overnight Source Type: news
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