This story supported through the Pulitzer Center.
When the UN International Organization for Migration predicts that up to a billion people will be displaced by climate change over the next 30 years, it is easy to believe that entire communities will be uprooted by catastrophic hurricanes or wiped out by epic floods likely triggered by global warming. . Climate change, as we saw in the United States and Pakistan earlier this year. But climate replacement-induced migration is likely to be like the village of Nagrain in southern Nepal, where an increasingly unpredictable monsoon has brought droughts, floods and heatwaves that make it all but unlikely to feed a circle of relatives. through cultivation. the earth. Local elders estimate that more than a portion of the city’s men have gone to work abroad, most commonly to Qatar and the Gulf countries in search of wages to send home to their families. Some 3. 5 million Nepalese (14% of the total population) paint abroad today, up from 220,000 in 2008. And while weather isn’t the cause of all migration, it plays an increasingly important role. “Climate change is encouraging other people to go to the Gulf to paint,” said Surya Narayan Sah, a social painter from Nagrain. “Here we have the rain to cultivate, and when it is erratic there is no food, so they have to buy it, and the only way to earn money is to send it abroad. ”
Labour migration can be an adaptive solution to climate change, but only if done well. Most of the time, this is the case. Because of their desperation, these climate-motivated migrant workers are vulnerable to exploitation. In the Gulf, where organized unions are illegal, they lack the capacity to protect their rights and better conditions to function. For this short film produced through TIME and Context and supported through the Pulitzer Center, I traveled in the direction that nearly one million Nepali immigrant workers have taken over the past decade to Middle Eastern countries like Qatar, where they helped build stadiums, hotels, transportation systems and entertainment venues that will welcome enthusiasts and players for the upcoming men’s soccer World Cup. which will begin on November 20.
Qatar has spent more than $200 billion in preparation for the World Cup, a structural frenzy that has drawn foreign attention to the country’s poor labour rights record. Even before FIFA, the foreign football deal hosting the World Cup invited Qatar to host the tournament. In 2010, the country was plagued by allegations of human rights abuses through its migrant workforce, which makes up 85% of the country’s population and includes a permanent underclass. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, hard-working organizations, and other teams have documented exorbitant hiring. fees, unpaid wages, miserable living conditions and exploitative contracts that amount to forced hard labor.
Read more: Thousands of migrants have died from Qatar’s excessive heat. The World Cup forced a settling of accounts
The global outbreaks have forced some kind of calculation. In 2017, Qatar began dismantling its “kafala” hard-work sponsorship formula in which migrants are tied to their employers and unable to relocate their jobs, among other reforms. A new report from the International Labor Organization has stated that over the past four years, Qatar has carried out fundamental reforms to improve “the working and living conditions of many thousands of employees”, but that “more will have to be done to put into effect and enforce hard-working reforms. And despite the Qatari government’s attempts to differentiate government-supervised World Cup framework projects from personal framework sites that do not meet official standards of hard work, a new investigation by human rights organization Equidem among 60 Migrant staff working on FIFA-related projects revealed discrimination, illegal hiring practices and, in some cases, unpaid wages, without However, they occupied positions in the structures of the World Cup stadiums. FIFA and its partners,” the organization notes, “suggest that the reforms undertaken in the afterlife fi Five years have served as an awning for hardcore corporations that seek to exploit migrant personnel with impunity”.
Read more: Environmental crises are forcing millions of people to move to cities. Can countries turn climate migrants into an asset?
Climate change could be causing labour migration from countries like Nepal, but it is also making these areas more dangerous, especially in the Gulf, where temperatures rise twice as fast as the rest of the planet. This particularly increases the threat to the exterior. de door painters. Qatar has included strict thermal hedges in its series of hard work reforms, and the country is now considered to have one of the most progressive thermal hedging policies in the world, albeit from a very low level (only a few Americans). States and a handful of countries have no heat coverage policies at all. )Even then, policies are only effective if implemented, and as the mistakes of other labour reforms demonstrate, implementation in Qatar can be uneven.
Moreover, such policies are only adapted to existing situations. Climate in the Middle East is expected to warm to 5°C (9°F) by the end of the century, according to a June 2022 study published in Reviews of Geophysics. Protecting outdoor personnel in such situations will require a radical overhaul of the way the structure is carried out. There are already some technological solutions, such as workwear that helps keep staff cool. Others are in the works, such as individual monitors, which can track a worker’s heart rate, hydration levels, and central frame temperature to save them thermal stress before it happens. But those technologies are expensive. They will only save lives if they are worthy of salvation.