African borders and global warming

In 2024, the African continent recorded 7.8 million displacements related to climate disasters, 1.8 million more than in 2023. These figures, compiled by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, are just one symptom among many of a developing reality: Africa, the continent that contributes the least to global greenhouse gas emissions, is the one that pays the heaviest price for global warming. Prolonged droughts in the Horn of Africa, cyclones of unprecedented violence hitting Mozambique, rising waters threatening the Nile Delta, desertification advancing in the Sahel. Everywhere, the climate is forcing people to leave their land. And everywhere, borders inherited from colonisation complicate, hinder or endanger these movements for survival.

The World Bank's Groundswell report, published in 2021, made a stark diagnosis: by 2050, up to 216 million people could be forced to migrate within their own countries as a result of climate change, including 86 million in sub-Saharan Africa and 19 million in North Africa. These projections, based on a pessimistic scenario, do not include cross-border migration or the effects of sudden climate events that displace millions more people each year. The actual number is likely to be much higher.

But the figure, spectacular as it is, says nothing about the complexity of the journeys involved. Because migrating in Africa means navigating borders that often have no geographical, ethnic or ecological coherence. It means crossing areas where the state has little presence, where armed groups thrive, and where resources are becoming scarce due to the combined effects of climate and demographics. Global warming is not only creating refugees: it is redrawing the continent's geopolitics, exacerbating community tensions, putting pressure on already fragile cities, and posing a fundamental question to the international community: what is the legal status of those whom the climate is driving from their homes?