Transitional Societies

A small girl feeds her parents cows in Kaduna State, where thousands of people displaced by Boko Haram are now shivering through the seasonal Harmattan winds.  Photo: Mohammad Ibrahim/IRIN

irinnews.org - BY Mohammad Ibrahim

KADUNA, 5 January 2016 (IRIN) - The temperature is dropping across northern Nigeria as the seasonal Harmattan winds blow in a haze of dust from the Sahara, blotting out the sun for days on end. It’s miserable at the best of times, worse still if you’ve been made homeless by Boko Haram violence and don’t have decent shelter.

“It has not been easy since we came to this camp 11 months ago,” said Mama Aisha, who fled Maiduguri, the main city in the northeast, and now lives 800 kilometres away in north-central Kaduna State. “We don’t have blankets to keep us warm.”

Aisha is just one of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have set up informal camps throughout the northern region, with little to no protection from the low temperatures.

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Migrants and refugees arrive on Sykamia beach, west of the port of Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on Sept. 22, 2015.  Iakovos Hatzistavrou—AFP/Getty Images

Even as Europe wrestles over how to absorb the migrant tide, experts warn that the flood is likely to get worse as climate change becomes a driving factor.

time.com - by Aryn Baker - September 7, 2015

. . . “You think migration is a challenge to Europe today because of extremism, wait until you see what happens when there’s an absence of water, an absence of food, or one tribe fighting against another for mere survival,” . . .

. . . Security analysts say they are already seeing the impact, particularly in migration patterns from northern Africa and the Sahel region, which is the band of farmland just below the Sahara desert. “All the indicators seem to fairly solidly convey that climate change — desertification and lack of water, or floods, are massively contributing to human mobility . . .

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reuters.com - by Joseph D'Urso - June 18, 2015

Almost 60 million people worldwide were forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution at the end of last year, the highest ever recorded number, the U.N. refugee agency said on Thursday, warning that the situation could deteriorate further. . .

. . . "I believe things will get worse before they eventually start to get better," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said at a news conference in Istanbul.

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http://www.slideshare.net/YALE-ESF8--VMOC

In light of Typhoon Haiyan, the Yale-Tulane ESF #8 Planning and Response Program has produced special reports for current efforts. To access these reports, click here.

The Yale-Tulane ESF #8 Program is a multi-disciplinary, multi-center, graduate-level program designed to produce ESF #8 planners and responders with standardized skill sets that are consistent with evolving public policy, technologies, and best practices. The group that produced this summary and analysis of the current situation are graduate students from Yale and Tulane Universities. It was compiled entirely from open source materials.

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