Under international law, someone who flees their country because of conflict or persecution is a refugee, but someone who flees because of inability to meet their basic household needs is not. In the case of Somalia, it is increasingly difficult to make any meaningful distinction between the two.

Over the past two years, colleagues and I have been working with Somalis living in Canada to document how environmental conditions shaped their decisions to leave their home country.

Some spent time in refugee camps in Ethiopia or Kenya before being resettled here with assistance from the UN Refugee Agency and the Canadian government. Others made their way to third countries like China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, or Syria before being sponsored by family members or making their own way to Canada to lodge a refugee protection application.

In all cases, concerns for their personal safety and the wider impacts of political instability and internal conflict were their immediate motivations for leaving Somalia. But the environment did play a role for many, and seems to have done so disproportionately by gender.

Household Insecurity

In the context of a broader project on environmental conditions and international migration to Canada, we conducted three focus groups with 21 Somalis (9 women and 12 men) in Ottawa, including one women-only focus group. Participants had arrived in Canada in the previous 10 years; some had settled directly in Ottawa while others relocated after landing in other Canadian cities. They were recruited with the help of gatekeepers, and focus groups were held in the Somali language with the help of research assistants.

We were especially interested in the experience of the women. Some had come to Canada together with their spouses and children, but a large proportion were single mothers who lost their husbands to the conflict, were separated from a husband who stayed behind, or had been divorced.

All of them held a remarkably deep knowledge of environmental conditions in Somalia and could describe at length how drought, deforestation, desertification, and extreme heat created scarcity of essential household resources like food, water, and cooking fuel. A lack of sanitation, water-borne diseases, and sudden-onset disasters like floods further exacerbated the health and personal security impacts of scarcity.

Participants in general, but more particularly women, saw these environmental problems as inextricably linked to the ongoing conflict, political instability, and lack of competent governance and economic structures.

For example, lack of reliable electricity and limited economic opportunities have led to unrestricted clearance of forests for the charcoal trade. Any remaining vegetation is further reduced by pastoralists relocating their herds from traditional grazing areas because of the combined effects of drought and local conflict. These are not second-hand accounts; several of our participants came from pastoralist households whose journey began when they had to sell their drought-starved cattle and move to the city.

Household environmental security in Somalia’s urban areas is not much better since the levels of conflict are generally higher. Food, water, and cooking fuel are just as scarce or more so in the city, leading some residents to seek refuge in rural areas even as rural refugees stream into the city.

Vulnerability Along Gender Lines

We have conducted focus groups with migrants from Bangladesh, Haiti, the Philippines, and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa as well, finding such ecological decline is often a second- or third-tier migration driver, especially among educated urbanites who have the resources to leave. But the Somali experience is distinct.

Conflict and political instability have exacerbated environmental scarcity in more pronounced ways than in other contexts, and social class is somewhat less significant in mitigating the impacts of scarcity compared to other countries, while gender compounds them.

In Somali society, women are responsible for food, water, and fuel collection and preparation, and are the primary caregivers for children. It is they who bear the full brunt of environmental scarcity and degradation.

When there is not enough food for everyone or when the nearest water source is miles away, it is women who suffer first. When their male relatives leave the home to fight in the conflict or are killed, the women and children left behind become even more vulnerable to environmental hardship, increasing their likelihood of becoming involuntarily displaced.

Somali women, therefore, have an even stronger imperative to leave than their counterparts elsewhere in Africa. Some of the participants in our focus groups witnessed women who were forced to abandon their children when they could no longer provide for them. Many who fled Somalia for refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya grappled for years with inadequate shelter, no sanitation, and (yet again) a lack of safe food, water, and cooking fuel.

Evidence of Migration Push Factors

Policymakers and the popular media have for many years debated the security implications of environmental change, and climate change specifically, with many fearing the future will bring growing levels of scarcity, conflict, and forced migration.

But the body of research on the subject is surprisingly small, especially with respect to international migration. Most of the available evidence comes from case studies of migration within less-developed countries or, at best, cross-border movements between contiguous countries. There have been very few empirical studies on how the combined effects of environmental change, conflict, and scarcity influence long-distance migration from the Global South to the Global North.

Our research shows that a Somali does not have to be a direct target of violence to wind up being displaced by the environmental degradation and scarcity that conflict fosters. Those who flee to refugee camps in neighboring countries may escape the immediate violence of ongoing civil war, but often do not escape scarcity and environmental insecurity.

Who Counts as a “Refugee”?

In such profoundly severe conditions of environmental scarcity, the requirement that people prove a well-founded fear of persecution to qualify for refugee protection seems arbitrary. And it is women and children – who suffer most from scarcity and environmental degradation and are therefore most likely to be moved by it – that are especially likely to be caught on the wrong side of this distinction.

If we refuse to consider these people refugees, they have very little hope of ever escaping their situation. Canada, the United States, and most other Western countries have increasingly selective immigration policies favouring highly skilled immigrants. We begrudgingly accept a small proportion of the world’s refugees so long as they fit the definition. For every Somali single mother who makes it to Canada, thousands more remain trapped with no hope of making it to the West.

Unfortunately, there appears to be very little appetite to expand the definition of refugee, so that people suffering from the environmental impacts of conflict are eligible for the protection afforded victims of persecution. Fixing the humanitarian and refugee crisis in Somalia will therefore require not only bringing an end to the violence there, but repairing the environmental damage it has caused.

That will take a very long time. In the short-term, aid organizations, donors, and refugee-receiving countries should pay more attention to the severe scarcity experienced by women and children fleeing Somalia and dedicate greater resources to helping them recover.