For thousands of years, natural factors like rainfall and temperature helped determine the fate of economies and societies. For thousands of years, humans also engaged in human trafficking and kept one another as enslaved people. But as human prosperity increased exponentially beginning in the 19^th century, it may have seemed that such concerns were relics of the past.

So why is it that now—in the early 21st century currents of the Anthropocene era—that even wealthy nations are struggling with both extreme weather and human trafficking?

One reason is the climate crisis, which affects security in a variety of ways, from undermining state capacity and legitimacy to fueling conflicts over water and land resources. And the contribution of climate disasters and environmental change to human trafficking, even in wealthy, developed countries like the United States, is perhaps the most underappreciated security-related consequence of climate change.

The numbers alone suggest that human trafficking—the use of force, fraud or coercion to exploit a person through forced labor, sexual exploitation, or criminal activities—remains a major problem. In 2016, the International Labour Organization estimated that there were 24.9 million victims of human trafficking around the world. In 2020, the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline identified a total of 16,658 victims of human trafficking, over 10,000 of whom were victims of sex trafficking and over 3,000 who were victims of labor trafficking.

Environmental Patterns in Human Trafficking

Natural disasters and environmental change have long made people more vulnerable to human trafficking, even before climate change accelerated in the early 20^th century.

The basic pathway involved is as follows: extreme weather events like fires or floods push people into environments where they lack resources, supportive networks, and protective authority figures. Victims of a hurricane may be forced to leave their neighborhood and take refuge in a hurricane shelter. Finding refuge within these unknown and volatile environments, vulnerable people become a target for human traffickers who know that their potential victims may be separated from their family, or do not have a home or job to return to.

Hurricane Katrina alone caused 1.5 million people to leave their homes in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in 2005. One Louisiana woman, Alison Franklin, told The World how she was “gang-trafficked” into sex work after the disaster. “So many individuals flooded just this area alone, that I know of,” she recalled. “They were homeless. They had no money. They had no place to live. And so, you’re not left with that many options when you are in that situation.”

The aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017 offered another example, as authorities observed an increase in commercial sex traffickers and online sex ads. One advertisement even addressed “pretty girls wanting to make some quick money and recover losses from Harvey.” Minors are especially vulnerable to trafficking after such disasters. In Baton Rouge, service providers estimated they assisted more than 100 minor victims of sex trafficking after Hurricane Katrina.

Labor trafficking is another concern after extreme weather events, and anti-trafficking service providers are raising awareness about it. Construction firms are eager to rebuild damaged infrastructure after these catastrophes, and individuals are desperate for income. The results can be devastating for workers.

A good example is the Signal International Case, one of the most prominent labor trafficking cases in U.S. history. After Hurricane Katrina, Signal International recruited male Indian citizens to travel from Asia to the Gulf Coast to repair infrastructure with the promise of U.S. residency and good pay. Yet these men were required to pay $10,000 to the recruiters in return for that residency and employment. When the men arrived in the United States, they obtained neither promised benefit. Instead, they were held in debt bondage and required to pay $1,000 a month to live in labor camps.

The Signal International case was successfully prosecuted, and the victims of the scheme were awarded $14 million. Given this heightened vulnerability for human trafficking, Louisiana has created a post-disaster awareness toolkit to warn people of recruitment tactics geared toward sex and labor trafficking.

Access to aid is a key reason for these challenges. Although Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) aid is theoretically available to all victims of natural disasters, the poorest eligible people—who are most vulnerable to human trafficking— often have difficulties accessing it. One reason, perhaps, is because these victims of extreme weather events don’t have formal rental agreements or deeds for the houses they are living in.

What’s more, one 2019 study found that survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Houston were less likely to receive FEMA grants if they lived in neighborhoods with more racial minorities. In general, human trafficking disproportionately affects women and girls of color, runaway youth, and LGBTQIA+ youth.

The Intensifying Challenge of Climate Change

In 2021, 573,078 people were internally displaced in the U.S. due to climate-related disasters. The acceleration of climate change has added a new dimension to these familiar patterns of vulnerability to human trafficking.

By emitting increasingly vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humans have increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. The resulting disasters often leave people without access to resources and money, displacing them from their homes and safety networks. The communal shelters where they take refuge are major recruitment locations for traffickers. Traffickers jump at the opportunity to “recruit” people removed from their community, income streams, and resources. The more catastrophes, the more opportunities for traffickers to find victims.

Unfortunately, climate change also hits the service providers who work to stop human trafficking. In the wake of hurricanes, for example, key preventers and interveners in human trafficking, such as police officers, medical workers, and anti-trafficking service providers, struggle to offer the usual protections. Fewer eyes are watching out for crimes like human trafficking. Disasters also disrupt power and communication channels. Anti-trafficking service providers cannot reach people who need their services.

The slow-motion effects of climate change also can be consequential in human trafficking. Climate change leads to desertification and recurring droughts, making it much harder for people to make a living through agriculture. Although farming in America is increasingly automated, about six million Americans still work on farms or process agricultural products.

Rising sea levels and increased flooding along the U.S. coastline add to the challenge, and responses to such events are now being formulated.

In 2016, the residents of the low-lying Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana became the first recipients of a federal grant aiming to relocate an entire community in order to protect it from the effects of climate change. The Biden administration launched a new program in 2022 to help Native American communities resettle in places less threatened by rising waters. These long-term slow-motion impacts can cause people to leave behind support networks and the safety of home as much as acute events do.

Accelerating Aid and Adaptation

Fortunately, there are many other ways to reduce the extent to which climate change increases vulnerability to human trafficking, even as the planet continues to warm.

In the United States, there is an increased understanding that it is critical to deliver financial relief as soon as possible after a disaster hits. FEMA has made significant improvements in providing assistance since Hurricane Katrina, including being proactive with assistance for disaster relief victims. For example, just one week after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Houston, 103,000 individuals were approved to receive FEMA assistance worth $66.4 million. (These disaster payments are usually deposited or sent within ten days of approval.)

Despite these improvements, some FEMA assistance continues to be held up in processing. These delays can be compounded by inconsistencies in the eligibility assessments for disaster relief. For instance, FEMA’s eligibility determinations for long-term, temporary housing have been found to disproportionality burden low-income households. In one reported case, some damages to one person’s home after Hurricane Harvey were determined to be “pre-existing” and therefore not eligible for disaster aid. This applicant spent $5,000 out of pocket to complete necessary repairs that still had not been completed a year and a half after the storm.

Enhancing the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program’s additional financial support is one way to further expedite the process. So far, this program has yet to be permanently authorized, and Congress must vote to top it up after each disaster. Permanently funding the program would reduce the burden on FEMA and get money to people before they get too desperate—which is when human traffickers strike.

Climate impacts are not the cause of human trafficking on their own. But they are a “threat multiplier” that makes people more vulnerable.

One reason Americans are so vulnerable to the shock of natural disasters is the weakness of the overall safety net. Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The Federal Reserve discovered that thirty-eight percent of adults in the U.S. do not have an extra $400 to cover an emergency expense. Thus, they might leap at the chance to do some off-the-books work for a shady character after a disaster. Addressing the structural inequalities would help reduce human trafficking—and also help people hold out for a few days before FEMA relief arrives.

Climate adaptation is another important approach to limiting human trafficking. For example, if a dyke or seawall prevents a flood from destroying someone’s home, they won’t have to move to a shelter or an unfamiliar town in the first place. And increasing awareness of the dangers of post-disaster trafficking is crucial too: authorities in shelters need to be aware of the risk and help deliver resources to people when they are at their most vulnerable.

It will take a concerted effort at multiple levels—from climate adaptation to recovery funding to police awareness—to prevent climate-related disasters from making society’s battle against human trafficking even more difficult.