Climate change as a driver of migration in sub-Saharan countries : an assessment of European Union policy measures

Abstract

Within this dissertation two significant questions are identified and tackled. The first question is: to what extent does climate change impact migration flow in Sub-Sahara African countries? The second question on the other hand analyses whether the European Commission considers climate change as a factor of migration in its migration related policies? This dissertation is made up of four chapters which altogether will try and give a complete answer to the questions mentioned above. Starting with the first chapter, were the notions of climate change and migration will be defined and explained, with a specific reference to Sub-Saharan Africa. This chapter also highlights the fact that most of the Sub-Saharan African countries are subject to the diverse negative effects of climate change which would than lead these populations to migrate. These migrants would be called climate migrants or environmental migrants both of these concepts will be introduced in this chapter. The second chapter explores how climate change effects migration, and whether it is true that it forces people to migrate from one place to another, while assessing the role of the EU with regards to climate change and migration. This chapter also highlights the fact that both International and European political agendas have given great importance to the impact of climate change within the last thirty years. Within the third chapter the type of methodology is chosen, this being content analyses. The main concepts of this type of methodology are introduced. This chapter shows step by step how the content analyses will be than performed in chapter four, starting from the case study of climate change in significant EU migration policies to the evaluation of the texts. The last chapter contains a content analyses of the four key migration documents of the EU being, The Tampere Programme, The Hague Programme, The European Pact on Migration and Asylum and the Stockholm Programme. A word count of various words will take place; all these words represent the link between migration, climate change and Sub-Saharan Africa. This evaluation is performed in order to show whether in these four documents the EU takes into account climate change as a factor of migration. These research questions were chosen as the connection between the impacts of climate change on Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions of the world, which than leads to migration is interesting. As because of us humans and the continuous burning of fossil fuels we are not only harming the environment but we are also harming ourselves and regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa which experience many vulnerabilities which makes it difficult for these countries to adapt or mitigate certain impacts of climate change. At the end of this dissertation all these points must be highlighted, the importance to increase the awareness and knowledge about climate change and climate migrants, create policies which safeguard the migrants affected by climate change, especially within Sub-Saharan Africa and decrease the amount of GHG emissions.