While world headlines are focused on climate change-induced disasters and displacement of populations, it is easy to ignore how Mauritius is struggling to come to grips with its own problem of climate refugees. And how this is already a problem.

1) How Mauritius is different…

Mauritius will have a hard time when it comes to climate change in the coming years; whether this is due to a warming climate – Mauritius has warmed by an average of 1.5 °C between 1951 and 2014; rainfall, which has decreased by an average of 8 per cent annually, or sea levels which have risen by 3.8 mm a year between 1988 and 2014; and which the Mauritian government itself warns could rise by 16 cm by 2050, and 49 cm by 2100. All of this means that Mauritius, according to the 2015 World Risk Report, is the 13th country most at risk of climate changeinduced disaster. 

As a small island-state, Mauritius is not alone in its vulnerability to climate change. In the neighbouring islands of Maldives – at risk of being submerged by rising sea levels – fears of climate change have led the government to start relocating parts of its population within the country. In 2011, it moved the people off its islands of Faridhoo, Kunburudhoo and Maavaidhoo to the larger island of Nolhivaranfaru in a massive population transfer that took six years to pull off. In 2007, after massive storm surges, it had to quickly transfer people off another island – Hathifushi – forcing many to leave behind their belongings. Maldives is now looking to buy land in other countries to eventually resettle their population in case their country slips beneath the waves. In this, it is emulating what another vulnerable island-state – Kiribati – is planning as it buys up land in Fiji. 

If islands such as Maldives and Kiribati are preparing for a massive exodus of their peoples, in Mauritius, the situation is a little different. And not as dramatic. For one thing, unlike Maldives and Kiribati that are relatively flat atolls – the land in Maldives has an average height of just 1.5m above sea level – Mauritius is a volcanic island with a relatively high central plateau, with elevations ranging between 270m and 828m above sea level. “Amongst the islands we have different types and Mauritius does have that small advantage,” says Sunil Dowarkasing, former strategist for GreenPeace and who has also worked as environmental advisor to the Mauritian government, “however, it is the coastal areas of Mauritius which are very vulnerable.” 

So, while Mauritius may not need to consider moving its people into another country, it is still facing the problem of moving climate refugees from one part of the country to another. And the numbers are not small: according to a government report in 2012, it is estimated that should sea levels rise by 2.5m to 6m, that would expose between 22,800 to 63,400 people in low-lying coastal areas to flooding and inundation. While dramatic events, such as heavy rainfall in 2013 in the capital Port-Louis that cost 11 lives, focus national attention on climate change for a while, what is less understood is that the Mauritian government is already grappling with its own climate refugee problem.

2) The failed operation at Rivière-des-Galets

To look at what climate refugees could possibly look like in Mauritius, one needs to look no further than Rivière-des-Galets, on the southern coast of Mauritius just south of Chemin-Grenier. Here, the 50 or so households have struggled for decades with a combination of rising sea levels, worsening climatic events, and plunging fish stocks. Since there is no reef – which also makes this a popular spot for surfers – it also means strong storms translate into high waves that wash away anything in its path. Major flooding events occurred in 1987, 2001, 2004 and 2006. And for decades, the government has struggled to contain the problem starting in 1995, when it built walls and groynes to help keep out the sea and prevent residents from seeing their homes inundated. However, in 2006, a tropical storm lashed the area with 10m-high waves travelling 50 km/hour leading to 19 families seeing their homes damaged and leading to two deaths. 

The immediate reaction from the government was to replace 450m of damages gabions in the area – more than half of the 800m initially laid out in 1995 and then in 2003 and constructing a 450m-long retaining wall to try to keep back the sea. It was also the time that the Mauritian government started contemplating simply transferring the 300 people of Rivière-des-Galets from the village to a safer area further inland. In 2008, the then-Labour Party-led government came up with a plan, but the planned relocation operation failed because the site they had chosen was more than 10km away from Rivière-des-Galets, too far away for the residents who were mostly fishermen. 

In 2012, the government commissioned a survey of those residents to see whether they were willing to be transferred: 49 per cent of them said yes; 43 per cent said only if the government would provide jobs and housing in the new area while eight per cent refused to move. Part of the hesitation was generational – older people were more unwilling to move – and part was economic: “those in ex-CHA houses, many of them containing asbestos were more willing to move while those who had built bigger, concrete houses were not willing to go anywhere,” explains Dowarkasing. Instead, the government had to make do with simply replacing another 130m of gabions installed in 2003 and 2008, and which had since been damaged. 

In 2014, the government earmarked Rs90 million provided by the UN’s Adaptation Fund to help coastal areas, including Rivière-des-Galets and in September 2014, hired a Finnish consultancy firm Indufor Oy to come up with suggestions of what to do about the area. Its report in August 2015 ruled out relocation because the government had not allocated enough funds for it and that it would take much longer than the programme’s life, which was until the end of 2018. Instead, it recommended bolstering sea walls in the area and improving drainage systems. The government continued to push for relocation and in October 2015, then-environment minister Raj Dayal announced that the government had found five acres of the St. Felix sugar estate on which to transfer the population of Rivière- des-Galets. 

“St. Felix sugar estate is willing to give the land. It is a question of fine-tuning procedures at the level of the ministry of housing and lands and also my ministry. The three parties definitely are willing to find a solution. Therefore, I think we are going to address the problem in a very systematic manner taking all factors into consideration,” Dayal told parliament on October 13, 2015. In April 2017, then-housing and lands minister Showkutally Soodhun said the government was moving to buy the land for relocation at an estimated Rs21 million. Nothing has been done since. “This whole relocation project was a failure, and no government has been able to resolve it,” says Dowarkasing, “in the meantime the vulnerability of these people is only increasing with the sea level.”

3) Other issues

If Rivière-des-Galets is an example of a failure to transfer a population out of a high-risk area affected by climate change, the village of Quatre-Soeurs in the south-east of Mauritius is an example of a success, albeit on a much-smaller scale. Pummelled by heavy rainfall and landslides, in 2010, 11 families were successfully relocated from the village to Camp-Ithier in Flacq. The village of Quatre-Soeurs also hosts the first climate refuge centre built in Mauritius – on land bought from a sugar company Sugot-Fermey and funded by the $9.1 million given to Mauritius by the adaptation fund. 

Climate change is also threatening to derail Mauritius’ plans to boost its food production and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of Petit-Sable just north of Mahébourg, and a major centre of onion production where 200 small planters grow the crop on land leased from the government. The area became a major onion-growing centre due to the fact that these grow best in a mix of sandy and loamy soil. However, rising sea levels leading to saltwater creeping into the water table – similar to what is happening in the north-east coast of Mauritius – heavy and erratic rainfall patterns and fertilizers from nearby sugar plantations have combined to make onion-growing more difficult. 

Heavy rains wash away onion seeds and can ruin an entire growing season with planters having to start each crop from scratch while increasing soil salinity due to encroaching seawater into the water table means that farming – and yields – are growing progressively worse. Unable to sustain themselves by growing onions, many have moved to other areas to eke out a living as carpenters, casual labour on construction sites, taxi drivers or fishermen. “Many of the people living in these coastal regions are extremely vulnerable because a lot of them are squatters who built their homes between the coastal roads and the sea back when the government still had not come up with regulations barring people from constructing anything less than 30m away from the high tide mark around the coasts of Mauritius,” says Dowarkasing.

4) Migration from Rodrigues

In a sense, climate migration is already happening within Mauritius; it’s just that it does not seem to be getting the attention it should. The island of Rodrigues has long suffered from a toxic mix of climate change and poor policy decisions. Starting in the 1970s, the island began overexploiting its ground water, allowing for saltwater intrusion into its water table. Deforestation was driven by the need for a cheap source of fuel, which reduced the island’s ability to attract rainfall and overgrazing on state-owned pastures – since farming land is officially state-owned, private farmers have little incentive to invest in sustainable agricultural practices – all combined to reduce farming on the island. As well as left the island to struggle with a perennial water crisis. “The same thing is happening in Mauritius as well, so we might be facing the same problems before long,” says Dowarkasing. Since the 1970s, its farmers and livestock breeders have moved into either government jobs or fishing. 

When the government introduced a bad weather allowance for fishermen in the 1980s, this led to a spike in the number of Rodriguans taking up fishing to escape farming: the number of registered fishermen nearly quadrupled from 500 in the 1970s to 2,069 in 1992. Today, their number is closer to 4,000. This has helped create an overfishing crisis in Rodrigues. Other practices such as sandmining – an estimated 25,000 tonnes of sand are mined from Rodriguan lagoons each year – further affecting fish stocks. But aside from these policy issues, fishing in Rodrigues is being hammered by climate change as well: warming seas are increasing the mortality of juvenile fish leading to plunging fish stocks, changing the migration patterns of fish away from Rodriguan waters and coral bleaching further impacting fish stocks in Rodriguan waters. In 2016, for instance, an el-nino event saw nearly 75 per cent of coral dying off in some sites in the north and west of Rodrigues. This is also becoming a problem in mainland Mauritius too where at some places such as Île-aux-Bénitiers, more than half of all corals have died off, plunging fish stocks and with 80 per cent of coral predicted to disappear as Mauritian waters get warmer. 

This growing climate crisis is, in part, driving the migration of Rodriguans to mainland Mauritius. The last census in 2011 estimated that in the previous five years, 1,116 people had moved from Rodrigues to Mauritius, most settling in areas such as Tranquebar, Roche-Bois, Pamplemousses and Black-River. The same year as the census, the International Organization for Migration surveyed people moving from Rodrigues to Mauritius to find out why. While 57 per cent said they were moving to Mauritius because of economic reasons, 31.6 per cent of all the Rodriguans in the survey said that this economic rationale was driven by environmental factors: declining fish stocks in Rodrigues was making it harder to earn a living as a fisherman in Rodrigues, pointing out how much of this migration between the two islands is linked to climate change. 

In Mauritius, they were looking for jobs in construction, just as Mauritius is transforming its own agricultural land into residential projects for sale. “They cannot make a living in Rodrigues, particularly if they are fishermen; so they come to Mauritius looking for opportunities,” says Dowarkasing, “so yes, climate change is part of the reason that is driving this migration to Mauritius.” Migrations linked to climate change is thus already a reality in Mauritius.