10.7a Ecological Displacement
Humans are moving due to climate change, other ecological factors, and social and political factors related to climate and ecology. Many people use the term climate refugee to refer to people who migrate for climate change-related reasons. However, the United Nations defines a person as a refugee if their displacement is due to the (fear of) persecution (see Chapter 9), which does not account for dislocation resulting from climate change or other natural disasters (Hiraide, 2022). Ecological displacement captures this specific form of displacement.
Naturally occurring phenomena like earthquakes also displace people. However, human decisions worsen the disasters brought on by earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural events. Consider, for example, the case of Haiti. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere (Roy & Labrador, 2024) and shares a border with the Dominican Republic on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Haiti has faced significant challenges to development because of French colonization, political instability, debt, and natural disasters (Roy & Labrador, 2024).
Haiti has faced a series of natural disasters. The nation was devastated by a 2010 earthquake, partially because of a lack of housing built to withstand earthquakes. The 2010 earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 people, and 1.5 million people were displaced (Lacarte, 2023). Then, Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti in 2016 (NASA, 2025). The hurricane caused at least 800 people to die and destroyed over 3,000 homes (Jones & Holpuch, 2016). Haiti has also been experiencing deadly cholera outbreaks since the 2010 earthquake which have caused thousands of deaths (Ocasio et al., 2023). Sanitation improvements have ended cholera in much of the world (Mayo Clinic, 2022). However, the 2010 earthquake disrupted the sanitation infrastructure in Haiti, allowing cholera to spread.
As of this writing, Haiti’s government continues to face significant problems, including widespread gang violence and gunfire directed at commercial airline planes (Sanon & Janetsky, 2024). The United Nations began providing Multinational Security Support in Haiti in June 2024 to provide security for the people of Haiti (United States Mission to the United Nations, 2024).
Due to both natural and human-made factors, many Haitians are internally displaced and have migrated to the United States, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and other Caribbean nations. The devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti caused significant migration. Still, Haiti’s history of underdevelopment, political instability, and more have also played an essential role in the displacement of Haitian people.
Photo 10.22
A Collapsed House as a Result of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake
Further, scholarship examining the relationship between drought, temperature anomalies, and migration to the European Union finds that climate characteristics, such as drought of the country of origin, only weakly predict migration to the European Union (Schutte et al., 2021). In the case of drought, for instance, rural people opt to migrate to urban areas within the same country rather than leave their country (Kwanhi et al., 2024). Moreover, climate change can lead to political violence and repression, which drives people to migrate to another country (Schutte et al., 2021). Several studies have shown an association between increasing collective violence, higher temperatures, and droughts (Levy et al., 2017).