Climate change is intensifying racialised displacement in Colombia. For internally displaced Afro-Colombians from the Chocó, environmental degradation intersects with conflict and state abandonment in shaping forced migration.

In Colombia’s Pacific coastal department of the Chocó, Afro-descendant communities are facing compounding crises. While the region has long been marked by underdevelopment, armed conflict and state neglect, a new and intensifying force is reshaping life and displacement dynamics: climate change. Shifting rainfall patterns, recurrent flooding, prolonged droughts and soil degradation have destroyed local livelihoods and transformed environmental threats into existential ones. Yet these are not simply natural events; rather, they are deeply embedded in racialised histories of territorial abandonment, exclusion and violence.

This article draws on original qualitative fieldwork conducted across six neighbourhoods in Medellín between September 2023 and May 2024 with Afro-Colombian communities displaced from the Chocó.[1] The study is based on 50 in-depth semi-structured interviews, complemented by participant observation and community gatherings designed to collaboratively identify key issues. It argues that climate change functions as an amplifier of structural violence and racial marginalisation, accelerating the displacement of historically neglected populations. By tracing how displaced families experience, narrate and resist this layered crisis, the article demonstrates how state abandonment and racialised governance generate a distinctive form of climate displacement that remains largely unacknowledged within national and international frameworks.

Environmental degradation as a trigger of displacement

The Chocó, one of Colombia’s most biodiverse yet impoverished regions, ranks among the areas with the highest annual rainfall globally, sustained by intense precipitation and dense river networks. Yet residents report that this hydrological cycle has become increasingly unstable in recent decades, a pattern consistent with broader climate-change signals documented in tropical Andean and Pacific lowland regions.[2] Seasonal rains have become less predictable, with sudden-onset floods inundating entire villages, while multi-week dry spells strain drinking water access and compromise planting and harvesting cycles. These shifts directly threaten small-scale agriculture and fishing – the foundations of Afro-Chocoano livelihoods – by eroding food security, reducing income opportunities and amplifying existing vulnerabilities.

Many fieldwork participants linked these changes to broader climate change processes, as well as to deforestation and illegal mining. Indeed, climate change, uncontrolled logging and gold mining (often by armed groups or multinational corporations) have intensified not only sedimentation in rivers – thus contributing to risks of massive flooding – but also river pollution. Residents describe how riverbanks erode more quickly, crops fail more often, and formerly fertile land becomes uninhabitable. In such contexts, climate change is not simply an environmental phenomenon but part of a broader territorial and racialised dispossession.

As one elderly woman from the San Juan basin noted during interviews:

“The water eventually took our house, but before that, it had already taken our fields and animals…when we asked the authorities for help, they said they couldn’t do anything…so there was nothing left to keep us there.”

In this sense, environmental stressors act less as new threats and more as amplifiers of existing forms of State abandonment and structural marginalisation. Displacement becomes the inevitable outcome when livelihoods collapse, State protection fails, and no institutional safety net exists.

Racialised displacement and the role of the State

Despite official narratives that position climate shocks as apolitical or ‘natural’, the experiences of Afro-Chocoano communities suggest otherwise. Participants in the study consistently described the absence of State protection in both the lead-up to displacement and its aftermath. They viewed local governments as largely ineffective, under-resourced or corrupt. Environmental early warning systems were either unavailable or ignored, and State authorities also failed to prevent land grabs or violent threats by illegal armed actors competing for resources across the territory.

Importantly, this absence of State support and protection is not new. It reflects a long trajectory of racialised State neglect, whereby Afro-Colombian territories receive minimal infrastructure investment, health services or educational opportunities. As scholars such as Arturo Escobar have argued, the abandonment of Afro-descendant territories is a form of structural violence: uneven development allows the State to justify directing resources towards regions deemed more ‘modern’ or ‘productive,’ thereby projecting the neglect of Afro-Colombian territories as a rational policy choice rather than racialised exclusion.[3]

Some residents viewed this neglect as intentional. One respondent, displaced from the Atrato River valley, explained:

“If this were Bogotá or Medellín, the government would have done something…but we are Black and we live far away from big cities, so they let the river wash us away.”

This perception that Afro-descendants are excluded from the collective sense of who is fully recognised as a citizen deserving of protection reinforces feelings of abandonment and further intensifies their displacement experiences. It also explains why many climate-displaced Afro-Colombians do not register as internally displaced persons (IDPs): they fear that, given the pervasive conflict-focused framework, their displacement will not be acknowledged as legitimate, and their rights will not be protected by the state.

Urban resettlement in Medellín

Displacement from the Chocó often leads families to Medellín, the capital of Antioquia, whose booming economy and public transport infrastructure offer the illusion of opportunity. In reality, Afro-Colombians arriving in Medellín face a new set of challenges. They are frequently pushed to the city’s geographical margins, including the steep, landslide-prone hillsides of the Aburrá Valley, informal and precarious settlements or flood-prone ravines.

This urban periphery is itself a product of historical displacement. Many of Medellín’s poorest comunas (neighbourhoods) – such as Manrique, Villa Hermosa and San Javier (also known as Comuna 13) – are home to generations of conflict-displaced Colombians, and new arrivals from the Chocó often settle alongside earlier waves of migrants. However, they report particular vulnerabilities as Afro-descendants, including racist policing, discriminatory rental markets and exclusion from local decision-making.

Crucially, housing is often precarious, consisting of informal dwellings built on unstable slopes, with no land titles, sewage or access to safe drinking water. Many families live in structures threatened by landslides or rain-induced collapses, mirroring the environmental vulnerabilities they left behind. This creates a tragic irony: those displaced by climate risks in the Chocó often find themselves re-exposed to environmental risks in Medellín, this time without the social safety nets of extended kinship or customary land rights.

Institutional gaps and policy failures

Colombia has a progressive legal framework on internal displacement, enacted through Constitutional Court rulings and the 2011 Victims and Land Restitution Law (also known as Law 1448). However, environmentally displaced Afro-Colombians face substantial obstacles in accessing assistance. One major challenge is the lack of effective recognition. Climate factors are excluded from displacement registries – the official databases the State uses to identify and certify IDPs – meaning those fleeing floods or environmental degradation often remain ‘invisible’ to the system. This limits their access to humanitarian aid, housing subsidies or psychosocial support. However, in April 2024 Colombia’s Constitutional Court issued a breakthrough ruling explicitly recognising climate change as a contributing factor to internal displacement for the first time. This precedent opens legal and institutional pathways for better recognition and protection of those displaced by environmental crises, particularly in historically marginalised regions such as the Chocó.

Another barrier is urban governance. Medellín has won global praise for its innovation, sustainable architecture and urban development, labelling itself as one of the world’s smart cities. However, critics argue this model often excludes poor, racialised communities, deepening the wealth gap between privileged and neglected neighbourhoods. As one local advocate explained:

“The city’s strategy is beautification, not inclusion. There are a few cable cars and museums, but most of our people in the slums still suffer from frequent water and electricity shortages…not to mention the deficient public bus system when you live up on the valley slopes…sometimes we have to walk one hour uphill to get back home after work.”

Indeed, the focus on urban spectacle and gentrification in certain neighbourhoods has created new tensions, particularly as informal settlers, many of them climate-displaced Afro-Colombians, face eviction or relocation due to infrastructure projects. In some cases, urban development is reproducing displacement, rather than solving it.

Community responses and everyday resistance

Faced with institutional indifference, Afro-Colombian communities have developed their own responses. During fieldwork, participants highlighted several grassroots initiatives, including traditional midwifery networks, mutual aid schemes, youth cultural workshops and women-led soup kitchens. These spaces serve not only as survival strategies but as sites of identity affirmation and resistance. One particularly innovative example is the work of local ethnic councils. Called consejos comunitarios, these are local governance bodies recognised by Law 70 of 1993. Members are chosen in community assemblies to represent the group’s interests. While they were originally tied to managing rural collective lands, councils have also adapted to urban settings, helping displaced Afro-Colombians maintain cultural and political representation. They work as a bridge between the community and government institutions, advocating for housing and land rights, pushing for inclusion in urban planning, and making sure displacement policies respect cultural and collective rights. In this way, councils protect not just material needs, but also community identity and survival during displacement.

These community responses are complemented by trans-local solidarity networks. Afro-Colombian leaders in Medellín often maintain links to their home communities in the Chocó, circulating news, mobilising resources and engaging in advocacy efforts both locally and nationally. Religious spaces, such as Afro-Colombian churches or community centres, often act as hubs for organising, while cultural practices such as traditional music and dance serve as forms of resistance and memory preservation.

However, community-led resilience remains fragile and uneven as these efforts often face barriers, including lack of funding, political co-optation and legal uncertainty. Participants emphasised that true transformation requires more than resilience, it requires justice as well as state support and recognition. One community leader put it plainly:

“We resist not because we are strong, but because we are ignored. We should not have to fight this hard just to be seen.”

Integrating Afro-Colombian voices into climate policy

While grassroots resilience is admirable, it cannot substitute for institutional accountability. It is critical that national and international actors move beyond symbolic inclusion and toward practical, systemic changes. Afro-Colombian voices must be central in shaping Colombia’s climate response, particularly when it intersects with questions of displacement, race and historical exclusion.

Emerging models of participatory climate governance, such as community-led risk mapping, offer promising directions. Likewise, academic and NGO partnerships that prioritise co-production of knowledge with affected communities help amplify marginalised voices. However, these efforts must be matched by political will, equitable funding and clear metrics of inclusion.

Multilateral frameworks such as the UNFCCC and the Cartagena+40 process should explicitly address the racial and ethnic dimensions of climate-related displacement by requiring race/ethnicity-disaggregated data; embedding the participation of Afro-descendant organisations in protection design and monitoring; and aligning adaptation, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and mobility policies with safeguards against discrimination for groups such as the Afro-Chocoanos.

Recommendations

The experience of Afro-Colombian IDPs from the Chocó challenges dominant narratives around displacement and climate change. It demands a shift from understanding climate-induced migration as a singular, apolitical process, to seeing it as a deeply racialised, historical and structural phenomenon. Climate shocks do not act in isolation; they compound legacies of neglect and exclusion.

The following policy recommendations could help address these challenges:

1. Implement the Constitutional Court ruling expanding the legal definition of forced displacement in Colombia to include environmental factors.
2. Integrate racial equity and cultural rights into all phases of climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction and urban planning.
3. Support Afro-Colombian organisations with direct funding, legal tools and participatory mechanisms for urban governance.
4. Develop tools that capture the environmental, social, economic and political drivers of displacement, enabling both analysis of complex mobility patterns and evidence-based advocacy for targeted policies and interventions.
5. Invest in the Chocó’s resilience by strengthening local institutions, infrastructure and land rights, preventing displacement before it begins.

Ultimately, this article underscores the urgency of reclaiming the narrative of environmental displacement, as a product not of nature, but of state agency, policy choices, historical injustices and institutional failures. Afro-Colombians displaced from the Chocó to Medellín are not just victims of climate change; they are survivors of systemic abandonment and architects of grassroots resistance.

Michael Nabil Ruprecht
PhD Candidate and Academic Researcher, University College London
michael.ruprecht.20@ucl.ac.uk
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/79226

Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson
Professor of Intersectional Justice, University College London
s.karlsson@ucl.ac.uk
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/87069

Michael Nabil Ruprecht would like to thank both his primary supervisor at UCL, Professor Brad Blitz, and his current advisor at Yale, Professor Elisabeth Wood, for their continued support during his PhD journey.

[1] The research for this article, including fieldwork as well as primary and secondary data analysis, was conducted by Michael Nabil Ruprecht as part of his forthcoming doctoral dissertation in political science and international public law.

[2] IPCC (2021) Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge, UK, and New York, US: Cambridge University Press

[3] Escobar, A (2008) Territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press

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