Fleeing Climate Change: The Real Environmental Disaster is a compelling DW documentary that examines how climate change is displacing communities worldwide.

How many millions of people will be forced to leave their homes by 2050? This documentary examines the so-called hotspots of climate change in the Sahel zone, Indonesia, and the Russian Tundra.

Lake Chad in the Sahel zone has already shrunk by 90 percent since the 1960s due to the increasing heat. Approximately 40 million people will be forced to migrate to areas with sufficient rainfall. Migration has long been a strategy for adapting to a changing environment. But the number of those forced to migrate solely because of climate change has increased dramatically since the 1990s. This is a double injustice: after profiting at the expense of the rest of the world, industrialized countries are now polluting the atmosphere with their emissions, bringing a second misfortune to the inhabitants of poorer regions.

One of them is Mohammed Ibrahim: as Lake Chad got hotter and drier, he decided to go where the temperatures were less extreme and there was still a little water, trekking with his wife, children and 70 camels from Niger to Chad and then further south. The journey lasted several years, and many members of his herd died of thirst. Now he and his family are living in a refugee camp: they only have seven camels left. Mohammed is one of many who have left their homelands in the Sahel, not because of conflict and crises, but because of the high temperatures. He’s a genuine climate refugee.

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