Main page content

What are the impacts of a changing climate on children? - Interview with Pim Kraan

These impacts on livelihoods, as Kraan states, are a root cause of migration in these regions, which already proves to be one of the biggest challenges for organisations like Save the Children.

"We have recently embarked on a refugees and migration cell to analyze the backdrop of migration because that is the red threat that is going to all our programs and we see that many of the refugees are actually on the move because of climate change and the impact on their livelihoods. That is going to be the main challenge. We see it at the moment at the east coast of Africa, people are no longer to sustain their lives on the spot where they were born and they start moving and that is our biggest challenge for this time.

To tackle this problem, we need to work together in a nexus. As the general said and the minister from Nigeria said, we need to address this together. NGOs like mine are there to deal with the outcomes of negative impact but we also need to be on the preventive side of things and within the nexus, the stress nexus that is propelling these kinds of movements, there we need to work together. That means actually for us that we need money. We need money to run the programs in the 120 countries we are in to address the root causes of migration that have very much to do with climate change impacts on the ground in the populations and the small villages in Africa."