Vulnerability and human mobility: a perspective from the Global South about colonialism and history

Abstract

The process of contemporary environmental change is characterized by being global, considering that for a long time, the impacts were more local. The first point is to highlight the difference between climate change and environmental change: the first is related to climate imbalances, while the second analyses not only the climate imbalances, but also other planet dynamics, such as the infrastructure, the resources exploitation, how territories are occupied and changed in the biogeochemical cycle of the planet; this is part of a broader vision of the planet and all the relations inside of it, the world-ecology. The second point to highlight is the social perspective of the global environmental changes, which means, it is not only a physical process, but rather a social, economic and political one. It is a social process because of how societies exploit the resources, including the workforce, and which may result in environmental impacts. It is essential to note that these changes do not occur in a homogeneous way because its main characteristic is to be heterogeneous. Still though, considering countries’ historical characteristics- the level of social and economic inequality, the demographic components, the consumption modes, among others- there are huge differences in terms of the intensity of the disasters faced and how they impact the populations (the environmental events that directly affect human populations).
The study topic of this paper is the Global South territories. The Global South is composed of countries from Latin America, Asia and Africa. They all have (in different intensities) a history of colonialism based on the massive exploitation of resources and human beings, first from the slavery system, and afterwards from low wages. The importance of focusing on the Global South is twofold:
1) the impacts of environmental changes directly affect their populations; 2) there is need to introduce a perspective from the Global South in order to tell its own history. This second reason is well related to the idea studied from a World-Ecology perspective, as it shows the world as an interconnected system that changes and influences itself the whole time with power/exploitation dynamics and not as separated entities, as some dualist/Cartesian perspectives may indicate.
During the colonialism period, colonies had to export raw material, while they import manufactured products, which is part of the international division of labour; the South is specialized mostly in raw material and agriculture, while the North is specialized in technologies and industries. It is important to highlight that this system not only implemented a political economic structure, but rather a social one based on inequalities, poverty and social problems. This system is based on the exploitation of the cheap natures in an ecology-world: workforce, raw materials, energy and food. Capitalist societies always seek to decrease the price of these elements, or even get them for free, as it happened during the colonial period with the exploitation of resources and slavery.
Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did these countries get their independence, most of them only after the Second World War. The independence processes sometimes occurred with violence and it reflected the trajectory of these countries, because the structure was kept in new formats, the so-called “neocolonialism”. Despite the independence process, the same structure was there, which means, the Global South is still an exporter of raw material and importer of advanced technologies. Nowadays, the international division of labour is even more complex.
It is important to point out the link that colonial history has with contemporary environmental changes. The goal is to show that the historical structure of the countries of the Global South is very important to understand economic, social and political inequalities. Studying structures is valuable to understand global environmental changes, as mentioned, because their impacts are different in the world. Physical changes must be understood together with social dynamics, mostly in relation to the concepts of risk and vulnerability.
The concept of risk is usually related to the physical and geographic susceptibility of the occurrence of a disaster, which means that coastal zones, delta zones, agricultural areas, poorly structured urban areas and densely populated ones are riskier, for example.
The concept of vulnerability is divided in different ways, such as: physical, environmental, social/demographic and economic. It means that depending on some elements, some people may be more vulnerable to disasters, or otherwise the capability of responding to them. For example, if a population in rural areas depends on resources from agriculture, they are more vulnerable to the higher frequencies of rain or droughts, and the exploitation of monopoly capital as well. Societies also have problems generated by gender inequalities, for example.
Summing up, the countries of the Global South were once colonized and that process produced damages in the contemporary structure. Another goal of this paper is to show how this dynamic results in greater risks when people have to face environmental disasters, and one result of that impact is displacement. Displacement is a response to environmental changes as some people lose their means of subsistence, and sometimes the only way to survive is by moving. Most displacements influenced by disasters occur internally.
For this reason, this article also discusses environmental displacement, as a part of current dynamics. It is noted that human mobility is very diverse, and this article works with internal displacement data available from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. This paper shows the compiled data from 2010 to 2018 about the ten biggest displacements in each of the aforementioned years. One of the most important results shows that the majority of these displacements occur in the Global South countries, some countries repeat the tendency to high mobility levels almost every year (China, the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh, among others). Another result is that there are more disasters related to the climate than to geophysical factors. The data also shows that some countries have both displacements related to disasters and conflicts, and it shows that conflicts may be related to disasters and vice versa. Most countries in Africa suffer from conflicts and slow onset disasters (drought, temperature increase). Furthermore, they all share some aspects like the colonial-metropoly relation history and a high level of soil exploitation for monopolistic purposes.
The methodology is divided in two parts: 1) bibliographic revision of colonial history and its theoretical relationship to environmental changes and the resulting displacements; 2) documental analysis through the data available on IDMC reports from 2010 to 2018.
The article is divided into three parts: 1) The first part is a theoretical debate on the exploitation of the Global South through colonization as well as a World-Ecology perspective from the academic space of the Global South; 2) the second part is about the theoretical aspects of the displacements caused by changes in environmental disasters such as immediate disasters (floods, hurricanes) and slow-onset disasters (droughts) and their correlation with the exploitation / depletion of the soil associated with monopoly activities; 3) the third part shows the results obtained in a master's research with the synthesis of data on internal environmental displacement within countries, showing that the majority of internal displacement directly related to disasters and loss of livelihoods occur in the Global South.