Usually people were forced to leave their land due to wars, persecutions, poverty. Now environmental factors such as long droughts or the rise in sea level are added.
Historically, each migrant was a person who, for some reason, voluntarily chose another nation or region other than the one in which they were born, to temporarily or permanently live there.
Today, a forceful and irrefutable climate change has been causing involuntary migrations, due to denied or underestimated and unprecedented signs and signals of such pernicious ecological transformations.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), “Each migration for environmental reasons is the “movement of people or groups of people (environmental migrants) who, predominantly for reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that negatively affect their lives or living conditions, are forced to leave their places of habitual residence, or decide to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move within or outside their country of origin or habitual residence.
Usually the causes of migratory movements were varied: wars, poverty, lack of work, religious persecution, etc.
Simultaneously or subsequently, only in South America as in The Caribbean, we can cite guerrilla wars, dictatorships or tyrannies, vg., Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc.
But, right now, there are also climate migrants or refugees, of which the case of the Senegalese Arouna Kandé is just one of them.
Arouna Kandé grew up in a family of farmers in the Kolda region of Senegal, where almost 80% of the population lives in poverty. The harsh droughts in the region and the increase in deserts made it unviable – very little less, unlivable – for people to stay there, and at age 8, Arouna’s family sent him to the coastal city of Saint-Louis, where he lived in an orphanage.
The young Senegalese grew up there but in recent years Saint-Louis has been slowly being consumed by the rise of the sea and the strongest storms tend to destroy buildings, industries, infrastructure and everything in their uncontrollable path.
With the growth of deserts in the east and rising waters in the west, Senegal is being suffocated by the planetary ecological crisis.
Many young people in this country see no choice but to risk emigrating to Europe and, tragically, often die on the way. Magnanimously, Arouna Kandé has dedicated her youth to help the children of the Saint-Louis orphanages to find better options; with it also to the sustainable development of Senegal.
This young man is one of the protagonists of The Letter, the film that the Laudato Si’ Movement (LS), in collaboration with the production company Off the Fence and various Vatican Dicasteries, will premiere on October 4.
Ecological regeneration, environment and climate, as a common good.
In the encyclical Laudato Si’ (Care for the common home) of Pope Francis promulgated in 2015. “The increase in migrants fleeing misery worsened by environmental degradation, who are not recognized as refugees in international conventions and who carry the weight of their abandoned lives without any legal protection” (LS 25).
According to Francis, “Inequity does not affect only individuals, but entire countries, and forces us to think about an ethic of international relations. Because there is a real “ecological debt”, particularly between the North and the South, related to trade imbalances with consequences in the ecological field, as well as the disproportionate use of natural resources carried out historically by some countries” (LS 51).
Finally, in this document, the Pope finds the roots of this type of environmental destruction in a pattern of consumption that pays little attention to the needs of life systems on this planet, of which people are a decisive part.