When the Water Rises: Climate Migration and Political Failure

Rolf, father of two, husband and good friend, used to live in Canoas, Brazil. In the rainy September of 2024, unexpectedly strong storms hit Rolf’s city.

...in the middle of the night, it started to flood on one side, and then the water gradually began to take over the neighbourhood. The residents couldn’t believe it when they saw the water coming; they thought the sewage system would drain it. But the water kept rising, the sewage system couldn’t handle it, and the water kept advancing. The residents started trying to build ways to divert the water, but the volume was enormous.

Rolf was one of 600,000 displaced people across 446 of the state's 497 municipalities, with at least 169 fatalities and widespread infrastructure collapse in the 2024 flooding of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The record-breaking levels of the Guaiva River affected around 2 million people. But more threatening than these numbers are the reports of people like Rolf who were also affected. The floods happened because of many factors. For instance, the Amazon flying rivers, which are constituted by moisture transported from the Amazon rainforest, combined with specific atmospheric conditions, deliver the equivalent of five months of rainfall in just two weeks.

The human impact of massive urbanisation in flood-prone areas and inadequate infrastructure also contributed to the flooding. Besides that, historical patterns of unequal development left marginalised communities exposed to environmental risks. This factor is the most intriguing aspect of situations of climate disasters, despite being usually ignored. Like Rolf, most the climate refugees are lower-class people, which is far from just a coincidence. The 2024 Rio Grande do Sul floods in Brazil are not only a natural disaster but an example of how climate-induced displacement is a multi-layered socio-political process that targets vulnerable groups disproportionately. This emergency illustrates that climate migration is not a future prospect but a present reality shaped by prevailing inequalities, political neglect, and the structural depoliticisation of natural disasters.

The role of climate change in the rising frequency of natural disasters around the world is undeniable. Current projections estimate that climate change will cause the voluntary and involuntary migration of 62 million working-age adults this century, the vast majority of whom will be internally displaced. Climate refugees, a term originally used in 1985 by UN expert Essam El-Hinnawi, are those who "have had to leave their habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a potential environmental hazard or disruption in their life-supporting ecosystems". But contemporary researchers also suggest more expansive definitions that acknowledge the extent to which climate impacts instigate cascading social and economic dislocations that compel individuals to move, even if the environmental link is indirect.

Displacement patterns are fundamentally shaped by who has access to resources, political power, and adaptive capacity. The concept of environmental justice becomes central here, as climate impacts are "largely determined by existing vulnerability and exposure", driven by "poverty and inequality, unplanned and rapid urbanisation, and poor risk governance". In Rio Grande do Sul, this manifested in how flooding disproportionately affected peripheral urban areas where low-income families, like Rolf’s, had been pushed by housing markets and inadequate public policy, creating what researchers term differential vulnerability to climate impacts.

In that way, despite the class and racial blindness of climate change, climate refugees are usually from the same group around the world: lower-income people. Understanding that this is not a coincidence but an effect of how policy is made around natural disasters is a first step to challenging the depoliticisation of the climate crisis. Besides that, being more concerned with reports such as Rolf’s reveals the human side of the situation. It highlights how using climate change as a blanket explanation for these events affects real people, the ones who become climate refugees, not only because of climate change, but also because of political decisions. Situations such as the flooding in the South of Brazil show that we are moving to a path where denying climate change is not the biggest issue anymore. The misuse and misconception of climate change, taking class, race and gender out of the debate and blaming only nature for these tragedies, are far more dangerous, and are sadly becoming more popular among Global South politicians.

By Luca Amado