Spotlight: Inequality, Social Cohesion, and the COVID-19 Public Health Crisis at the Nexus of Water and Migration
SPOTLIGHT
INEQUALITY, SOCIAL COHESION, AND THE COVID-19 PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS AT THE NEXUS OF WATER AND MIGRATION The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted all aspects of social, economic, and political life, and it will inevitably influence the nexus of water and migration. But how it will do so is difficult, if not impossible, to predict. A very high degree of uncertainty remains about how long the pandemic will last, when vaccines will be successfully rolled out globally, and what the scale of the pandemic’s health and economic impacts will be. The immediate impacts of the outbreak, and the nonpharmaceutical interventions taken by governments to contain it, have disrupted travel and brought life in dense cities to a standstill. These effects have had immediate consequences for the flow of migrants, their livelihoods, and the welfare of their families. For instance, the sudden reduction in access to jobs and remittances has been found to disproportionately affect migrant households in Bangladesh and Nepal; these households experienced 25 percent declines in earnings and a fourfold increase in food insecurity (Barker et al. 2020). Also, necessarily, the pandemic will have many mediumand longer-term effects. It will leave lasting scars on investment levels, remittance flows, the skills and health of millions who are unemployed, human capital outcomes of children (through school closures), and supply chains (World Bank 2020). All of these channels, and others, stand at the interface of water and migration, some more obviously than others. Lessons from history suggest that effects can lead to persistent losses as well:
41
