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Climate disasters bring misery of the displaced to focus of COP27 agenda

Issack Hassan lives in a migrant camp in Baidoa, Somalia, and is one of over a million people who have been displaced since January due to five consecutive failing rainy seasons.

With Somalia suffering from its worst drought in 40 years, ‘people were weak from starvation, so we had to evacuate for our lives,’ said Hassan, 82. He couldn’t, however, avoid calamity.

‘My wife died of hunger here, and I felt helpless,’ he said in a video interview released by the United Nations refugee agency.

According to the United Nations International Organization for Migration, 22 million individuals like Hassan are relocated each year as a result of climate-related calamities (IOM).

Some have lived along coasts or on islands that are being eroded by rising sea levels. Others in the Arctic have fled thawing permafrost cliffs.

Experts argue that when people are uprooted, they become more vulnerable to violence, hunger, and disease. With climate change generating increasingly severe weather around the world, the number of displaced people is predicted to rise to almost 143 million by mid-century.

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