Climate Migration & New Technology

05/09/19 • 14 min

A Way Home Together: Stories of the Human Journey

From the flood plain in Bangladesh to droughts of Central America and rural Africa, climate change is becoming a driver of migration. Farmers leave their land when the weather makes it too difficult to harvest crops.

In this episode of “A Way Home Together, Stories of the Human Journey”, we look at the impact of environmental degradation and change.

“It’s a very very complex topic,” says Dina Ionesco, Head of Environmental Migration and Climate Change Division at the UN migration agency, IOM. “Floods, desertification, sea level rise, and loss of ecosystems are drivers of migration, and increasingly so. But very often they are connected to other issues.”

Host, Tolu Olubunmi, has an in-depth interview in this podcast with entrepreneur and environmentalist, Ibrahim AlHusseini, founder and CEO of FullCycle, an investment company accelerating the deployment of climate-restoring technologies.

Ibrahim explains why he is “extremely hopeful” that new technology can create significant amounts of clean energy. This “isn’t just an exercise in doing the right thing. These technologies are also faster, cheaper and more profitable.”

This episode is produced with funding from IOM and FullCycle.

In this episode of “A Way Home Together, Stories of the Human Journey”, we look at the impact of environmental degradation and change.

This episode is produced with funding from IOM and FullCycle.

Previous Episode

#10 "Lifeboat" Rescue at Sea

What happens when the world fails to live up to the goal of safe, orderly and regular migration? In the latest episode of "A Way Home Together, Stories of the Human Journey", we look at an urgent search-and-rescue operation to save the lives of desperate migrants and refugees, who were crowded onto rafts and small boats in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya.

"Lifeboat" is a half-hour film that was recently nominated for this year's best short-subject documentary Oscar. The Academy Awards will be announced in Hollywood on February 24.

"I consider it part of my work to make the unwatchable watchable," says "Lifeboat" Director Skye Fitzgerald. "If we can build empathy towards those who are making a conscious bid to flee torture, detention, rape and trafficking, I think it gets us one step closer to systematically solving the problem."

His film follows dramatic rescues by volunteer crew members on a re-fitted research vessel, "Sea Watch", as they save the lives of people in imminent danger of drowning.

"It's a shock to the system," said Sea Captain John Castle, who led the rescue attempts. "We've got a lot of people in terrible trouble in the small boats, and the boats aren't going to last very long out there."