Climate Change Resettlement -- Living With Flood or Forced to Move?

In my first blog, I said “environmental change” is a wide concept that we shall not limit to climate change only. So this week’s focus will be more on the human side, which is the resettlement of people for adapting environmental change. It is a controversial topic throughout history, and I will discuss it from different perspectives using some examples from Africa, and link its impact on water.

 

Planned resettlement in Africa has a long tradition as it is commonly used as a political approach for increasing resilience to climate change and natural disasters(Artur et al. 2013), or simply for reordering the poor and vulnerable population from the government’s interests (Arnall, 2013). Resettlement provides opportunities for the production and human settlement to be reconstructed, thus improving the standard of living of people affected and their regional economy (Dwivedi, 1999:44). In the current world, resettlement has become an “overriding legitimization” for protecting people from recurring and imminent natural disasters, which thus could be triggered mostly by climate change (Artur et al. 2013).

In terms of floods, this could be translated into a policy to resettle the affected people away from the flooding areas. However, a series of different outcomes always come with every resettlement, which generates debates between “living with a flood” or “resettle out”.

I shall place these theories into a real-world example, still from Mozambique. Since I want to link the content to my previous blogs, and I believe it is a perfect case for representing the flood resettlement. In the newest report from 2020, illustrated by figure 1, the most affected areas from the tropical Cyclone Idai and floods were Buzi, Dondo and Nhamatanda in Sofala province, with 16,874 Zambian families being displaced and resettled (DTM Mozambique, 2021).

 

Figure 1 Impact of tropical storm Chalane in the resettlement sites in the central region of Mozambique

The resettled site always have poorer living conditions. The water problem exists in the resettled areas, including a lack of sufficient latrines and bathing spaces, water shortage, difficult accessibility of water, bad water quality. The report shows that although 99% of the selected sites have access to functional latrines, there are still some sites reporting a lack of functional latrines, such as the Nkganzo site Tete province of Mozambique. For the sanitation conditions, 19% has no individual latrines and bathing spaces (shared between many families). Regarding the means of getting freshwater, 76% still use hand pumps, followed by 10% using open wells, which made the water vulnerable to outside contamination. Therefore, problems like long waiting times and bad water quality were reported, with the percentage of 11% and 6% of the selecting sites, respectively. Over 30% of them need to wait for more than 60 minutes to get water. This evidence reveals the difficulties for ensuing a solid physical living environment after flood resettlement. 

 

Climate change resettlement thus become a controversial topic that hanging around “staying” or “moving”. Although it is seen as a very successful approach for better development and security, and helping people to use their land more efficiently by the government, the cost of resettlement still outweighs the benefits. As the policy is considered an unpopular top-down social policy, which destroys resettled people’s livelihoods as they “lost their physical, economic, social and environmental assets and cultural identity” (Artur et al. 2013). In the case of Mozambique, Small-scale Farmers were involuntarily resettled from their original agricultural land to higher-altitude, less fertile areas with poor living conditions. They do not always have an alternative choice due to the inevitability of flood’s impact. Resettlement is always seen as “a necessary step to increase people’s resilience as impacts from natural disasters are always inevitable” (Artur et al., 2013). In this situation, Mozambique’s flood resettlement appears to be more of an ‘adaptation’ to economic rather than environmental change, as the interests of some of the poorest and most marginalised people in the society are largely ignored (Beilfuss et al., 2010). This often leads to loss of land and home, unemployment, marginalization, morbidity, food insecurity, lack of access to public property and society, which then creates or exacerbates poverty and vulnerability (Cernea, 1996). Also, the anxiety and insecurity of involuntary immigrants are much higher, as the involuntary resettlement severely damages their relationship with their old environment, and their relationship with the new environment will be mostly seen as ‘an obscure and stinking encounter’ (Asthana, 1996).

 

It is thus better to minimize or avoid involuntary resettlement, or to allow voluntarily resettle elsewhere once the objectives have been accomplished – or not (Palmer, 1974; Cernea, 1996). However, there is always a hard choice when facing different policies under natural disasters, which thus leads to multiple outcomes.

 

 

 

 

=