Zimbabwe's climate migration is a sign of what's to come | MIT Technology Reviewhttps://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/17/1041315/climate-migration-africa-zimbabwe/Mutero is just one of the 86 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who the World Bank estimates will migrate domestically by 2050 because of climate change—the largest number predicted in any of six major regions the organization studied for a new report.
At the height of the most recent drought, which lasted from 2018 to 2020, only about half as much rain fell in Zimbabwe as usual. Crops were scorched and pastures dried up. People and livestock crowded around hand-pumped boreholes to find water, but the wells soon went dry. Some people in the driest areas had so little to eat they survived on the leaves and white, powdery fruit of baobab trees.
More rain fell during the last growing season, but many farmers still feel uneasy about the future. Maize—Zimbabwe’s staple crop, which was aggressively promoted by the former colonial government beginning in the 1940s—is becoming impossible to grow.
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Over 5 million Zimbabweans—a third of the population—don’t have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program. A study in 2019 of how vulnerable countries were to agricultural disruption due to drought ranked Zimbabwe third, behind only Botswana and Namibia.
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As Mutero and other climate migrants know, conditions are somewhat better in the Eastern Highlands. This mountainous region stretches for around 300 kilometers along Zimbabwe’s border with Mozambique. Many of the region’s major rivers, including the Pungwe and Odzi, begin there as streams. The area’s climate and fertile soils are perfect for growing crops such as tea, coffee, plums, avocados, and a sweet pinkish-red fruit called lychee.
When climate migrants started showing up in the Eastern Highlands a decade ago, they settled without permission on state land, and the government was swift to evict them. But they returned in even larger numbers, and officials have more or less given up trying to stop them.
By 2015, the government estimated that more than 20,000 migrants had settled in the Eastern Highlands. Though no more recent official estimates exist, anecdotal evidence suggests the number has continued to climb.
Today in some parts of the highlands, migrants occupy any vacant land they can find. In others, traditional or community leaders like the one helping Mutero, who are known in local dialect as sabhuku, have taken up the task of allocating land to migrants. The leaders—whose roles are largely ceremonial—are doing this in defiance of government orders. They’ve earned praise from migrants but disdain from local farmers who were there first.
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Leonard Madanhire, a farmer who lives in what’s known as the Mpudzi area in the Eastern Highlands, is worried. He grows mostly maize on his five hectares of land. His herd of cattle has dwindled from more than 20 a decade ago to five. Most nearby grazing lands, which he has long shared with other farmers, are now occupied by climate migrants.
In September, Madanhire took me on a long hike along the banks of the Chitora River. Freshly built dwellings stood on land that was once pasture; other structures dotted the river’s banks. A couple of seemingly frustrated herdsmen were trying to steer cattle and goats through the narrow patches of pasture that remained.
A few kilometers upriver, migrants had planted vegetable gardens on the river’s edges. Madanhire says farming along the banks that way causes erosion and puts more silt and debris in the water for everyone downstream.
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“As climate change intensifies, it is going to make some of these areas uninhabitable,” she says. “Rather than having to deal with a rushed mass migration, which will put severe pressure on the areas that people migrate to, we should be planning for a gradual evacuation of the most vulnerable areas now.”
She says the government should do a nationwide land audit to figure out where space is available for migrants and create a process by which people can legally resettle there—perhaps with a bit of money or other support to get them started. While the government is doing a lot to properly relocate people from flood-prone areas, it’s doing little to relocate farmers from places prone to drought