Mr. Chairman, Your Excellencies, distinguished Delegates,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is an honor to be here with you today. As the lead global agency on migration, located in nearly 500 field locations, IOM is acutely aware – on a daily basis – of the massive impact of drought and climate change on human mobility throughout the world.

The High Level Meeting on National Drought Policies Declaration acknowledges the urgent need for appropriate and inter-sectoral drought management and preparedness policies. There are many reasons why achieving this goal requires the integration of migration. I would like to present you with three of these.

First, we live in an era of unprecedented human mobility: 1 billion of the world’s 7 billion people are migrants, who move with greater frequency, speed and complexity than ever before in recorded history.

Environmental degradation is, unfortunately, a strong migration driver and forces increasing numbers of people to leave home and migrate because drought and water scarcity have made their livelihoods insecure. Climate change and environmental degradation present us with new challenges in migration and population displacement: IOM’s worldwide survey on environmental migration concluded that, after floods, drought is the largest environmental cause of forced migration. And yet, migration and population displacement were never mentioned in UNFCC declarations until Cancun in 2010 and did not feature at all in the MDGs.

Incorporating migration in national drought policies will support and contribute to the preparations for the UN Second High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development and the post-2015 Development agenda. In so doing National Drought Policies will have produced a broad, long-overdue consensus on the importance of migration for development.

Second, a migration lens can help us to identify vulnerable persons whom traditional humanitarian responses often neglect. For example, in southern Somalia, the worst drought in 60 years, combined with insecurity, generated a massive humanitarian crisis – a crisis that displaced  millions within Somalia and across its borders – by conservative estimates, 1 in 3 of the 7.5 million population. This movement created migrant specific vulnerabilities and impacts on livelihoods.

Based on lessons learned from the Libyan crisis – in which IOM and UNHCR evacuated 250,000 migrants to 54 countries, we developed a Migration Crisis Operational Framework as an analytical and operational tool. The framework a) provides better assistance to vulnerable mobile persons, to b) clarifies collaborative roles in migration crises, and to c) bridges the sustainability gap by strengthening government capacity.

My third point is that the migration lens helps us respond more effectively to persons and populations displaced by drought. In this regard, IOM has developed a Migration, Environment and Climate Change programme, a program that integrates human mobility into National Adaptation Plans, in Disaster Risk Reduction plans, and into recovery strategies. Managing drought-driven rural-urban migration is an important part of these plans.

In this planning context, safe labor migration options bolster drought-affected populations’ ability to cope and sustain themselves and to reduce pressure on local resources. Such efforts are necessary in countries like Tajikistan, for instance, where drought forces people to adapt their livelihoods by resorting to labor migration. Where environmental degradation is too advanced, IOM’s expertise in Land and Property Claims is vital for sustainable relocation.

Unfortunately, for areas affected by drought and water scarcity, there is very little funding for the post-crisis period to develop sustainable livelihoods for those whom drought has displaced; examples range from Iraq to the more than 177,000 Sub-Saharan migrant workers that IOM and UNHCR repatriated during the Libya crisis. Clearly, we must combine our efforts and resources. 

Conclusion

IOM’s mandate is to support orderly, facilitated and humane migration in the face of climate change and environmental degradation. We note the HMNDP call for partnership – an appeal which we endorse and join -- and we will work with all organizations to make human mobility part of the solution. We shall do so in the field at our 500 sites and by leveraging the HLD and the post-2015 Development Agenda to support a cohesive common agenda – an agenda that integrates drought, migration and development.