Climate change and modern slavery and unwanted marriages

Weather extremes and related natural disasters are exacerbating the problem of modern slavery. The situation is particularly dramatic in Africa, as local military and criminal organizations take advantage of the increasing impoverishment and displacement of people to force labor and marriages.

What is modern slavery?

There is no single concrete definition of modern slavery. For the purposes of quantitative estimates, the International Labor Organization (ILO), which is concerned with the protection of workers’ rights and the reduction of child labor on a daily basis, has suggested that victims of forced labor and forced marriage be combined under the term. The category also includes human trafficking, serfdom, forced begging and de facto slavery, which paradoxically still exists in the world.

In Africa, slavery by descent is a specific problem. This is a situation in which a family’s ancestors were once enslaved by other families, and offspring born into slavery inherit the status of being privately owned, usually in the maternal line. Thus, entire generations of people are subjected to exploitation and never gain the right to personal and financial autonomy – they are inherited, sold and given as gifts, and are not paid for their labor. This pathology is perpetually alive in Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali and Sudan.

Modern slavery in the world in numbers

According to a report prepared by ILO, the International Organization for Migration and Walk Free in 2021. 49.6 million people worldwide were victims of modern slavery – 27.6 million of whom were forced to work and 22 million living in forced marriages. Compared to 2017, there has been a significant increase in the number of victims.

Among the people forced to work, 11.8 million were women and girls, and 3.3 million were children. The situation worsened markedly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the health crisis led to an increase in the value of the debts of the poorer population. Modern slavery in the form of forced labor is particularly prevalent in Asia and the Pacific, where as many as 15.1 million people work without pay and against their will. In Europe, the number reaches 4.1 million, while in Africa it is 3.8 million. The ILO report shows that while modern slavery occurs in countries of varying economic status, the problem is most pronounced among low-income societies.

86 percent of the world’s forced labor is associated with the private landlord sector, and 23 percent is linked to sexual exploitation. However, the problem affects almost all economic sectors, especially the spheres of services, industrial production, construction, agriculture and domestic service. The primary form of enslavement observed in 36 percent of cases is the long-term non-payment of wages or the threat of misappropriation of earnings if one leaves. Unfortunately, imprisonment and physical and sexual violence are also still observed.

African realities: exploitation and violence

According to ILO data, 3.8 million people in Africa are victims of forced labor, and another 3.2 million live in forced marriages. The problem particularly affects Eritrea, Mauritania and South Sudan. Daniel Ogunniyi, a researcher on the problem of modern slavery in Africa and its links to climate change, estimates that the key risk factors in this regard are poverty, armed conflict and general political instability. Smugglers take advantage of the impoverishment of societies by offering people false jobs off-site. As a result, millions of victims are deported, forced into long, torturous labor and subjected to exploitation and sexual abuse.

Tens of thousands of women have been kidnapped and forced into marriage or sexual slavery during the recent wars waged in Africa. In many countries, wives and concubines are still sold and assigned by commanders – in this regard, little has changed since the 19th century.

How is climate change exacerbating the crisis in Africa?

According to Daniel Ogunniya, the long-standing problem of modern slavery and human rights violations in Africa is clearly being exacerbated by increasing climate change. Floods, droughts, fires, water scarcity and rising sea levels are circumstances that exacerbate existing social inequalities. As a result of natural disasters, people die, leaving loved ones without a source of income, whole families lose their roofs over their heads and earning opportunities. Displacement begins, and it is the migrants who are most vulnerable to exploitation under modern slavery.

A joint report, prepared by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Stockholm Environment Institute, already highlighted two decades ago the correlation between climate change and the financial well-being of societies. In Tanzania, for example, it is the poorest who depend most on the environment and the vagaries of the weather, while in Burkina Faso, soil degradation and increasing water scarcity are clearly leading to impoverishment and food shortages. These are just two of the many examples of the economy’s dependence on climate change.

This vulnerability is exploited by criminal groups and terrorist organizations, such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram and Somalia’s Al-Shabaab. Extremists force desperate victims of climatic disasters into military action or sexual slavery. Many families are saving the household budget by selling their children. After the COVID-19 pandemic, reports began coming in from Africa of increased child marriages in Sudan, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and Uganda. In Ghana, the drought is forcing millions of citizens to migrate from north to south, and some of the displaced are quickly falling into the hands of smugglers.

Unfortunately, analysts predict that ongoing climate change will increase the number of displaced populations – already in 2023, migration forced by conflict and natural disasters reached 35 million in Africa, and is expected to exceed 86 million by 2050.

Proposals for action for Africa

Daniel Ogunniyi, in a study on modern slavery in Africa published in 2024, proposed a number of measures that could reduce the scale of the problem. These include:

• Adaptation and implementation of laws criminalizing forced labor and human smuggling at the state level;
• Developing international cooperation in African regions to reduce the scale of cross-border slavery;
• Launch campaigns to raise awareness of the risk of enslavement to the most economically vulnerable segments of society;
• initiatives to level poverty and social inequality;
• Revise climate change policies to address the link between climate and modern slavery, adjusting adaptation and mitigation measures accordingly;
• Forcing companies operating within the renewable energy sector to monitor human rights at all levels of operations and subcontracting.

It is worth recalling that according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Africa is the continent that bears a disproportionate cost of climate change. By 2030. Up to 118 million people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.9 per day) could experience the catastrophic effects of drought, floods and high temperatures. The risk of a further increase in modern slavery is therefore real and serious.