After five years of relentless conflict and human tragedy, the world has begun to sense the permanence of Syria’s refugee crisis. Those who have fled violence are unlikely to return home anytime soon. Instead of seeing the crisis through a purely humanitarian prism, focusing on aid and resettlement, host countries and international donors are now looking more at how to provide sustainable livelihoods and integrate Syrians into their host communities, in particular by bringing them into the workforce. In countries like Turkey, which hosts some 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees, and Jordan, which hosts more than 650,000, creating a legal [...]
Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on countries’ risk exposure, contribution and response to climate change. According to a recently released report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, climate change will lead to more frequent and severe droughts in the Caribbean region, already home to seven of the world’s most water-stressed countries. That will in turn affect agriculture, with the risk of food shortages. In an email interview, Carlos Fuller, the international and regional liaison officer at the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, discusses the region’s climate change policy. WPR: What is the [...]
Amid the wave of migrants fleeing to the United States from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala—collectively referred to as Central America’s Northern Triangle—another migration crisis is unfolding farther south. The Central American isthmus is increasingly becoming a pressure point for migrants from around the world, whether Cubans attempting to reach the U.S.-Mexico border via a circuitous route that begins in Ecuador, or migrants from Africa and South Asia who have been shut out of Europe and look instead to entry points in South America that lead north. The influx is not only straining the resources of countries in southern Central [...]
