In Senegal, migration is never driven by a single cause. However, in several rural and coastal areas, land degradation, the scarcity of resources and the fallouts of climate change are contributing to the deterioration of living conditions and may influence decisions to leave. As COP17 on desertification gets underway in Ulaanbaatar (the capital of Mongolia), this analysis explores a link that remains under-documented in the Senegalese public debate: the connection between the state of the land and migration patterns.
On the occasion of the seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (COP17), held in Ulaanbaatar, the link between land degradation and human mobility is emerging as an international issue. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is calling for investment in land restoration, drought resilience and adaptation to be accelerated and scaled up, in order to reduce the risks of displacement before they escalate into humanitarian crises.
The organisation believes that land degradation, human mobility and security can no longer be addressed in isolation. They constitute interdependent challenges that require coordinated responses in terms of public policy, financing and development. As part of its commitment to COP17, IOM is therefore urging governments, international financial institutions and their partners to step up investment aimed at protecting livelihoods, strengthening community resilience and preserving people’s ability to choose between staying, moving safely or returning home with dignity.
“We are still far more effective at funding the consequences of population displacement than at investing early enough to reduce the risks,” Ugochi Daniels, Deputy Director General of the IOM underscored. According to her, when land degrades, people gradually lose their ability to choose between staying, moving safely or returning to their communities of origin. The issue therefore goes beyond the question of migration alone: it directly affects livelihoods, food security and the resilience of territories.
The figures illustrate the scale of the phenomenon. Nearly 40 per cent of the world’s land area is now believed to be degraded, affecting around half of humanity. Some 3.2 billion people live in areas affected by land degradation, whilst climate-related disasters have caused nearly 200 million internal displacements over the past decade. Land degradation can thus compromise access to water, food, arable land and the economic activities essential for keeping people in their territories.
COP17, held under the theme ‘Restoring the land. Restoring hope’, therefore raises a question that goes far beyond environmental issues: what happens when territories no longer allow their inhabitants to remain?
It is precisely at this level that the case of Senegal becomes particularly interesting. In several regions of the country, land degradation, declining soil fertility, salinisation and the increasing vulnerability of agricultural and pastoral activities do not, on their own, fully explain migration. They may, however, contribute to reducing local economic opportunities and intensifying the pressures that drive certain populations to move. To understand this relationship, one must therefore look beyond the declarations of COP17 and examine the areas of origin. For before the migration route, there is often a plot of land, an agricultural activity, a village or a stretch of coastline where living conditions have gradually deteriorated.
In Senegal, there is much talk about migration routes – those to Spain by boat, those to Europe via Morocco or Libya, and the more discreet routes to The Gambia or Mauritania. Less often mentioned is what comes before departure: land which, over the years, has ceased to feed those who cultivated it. Yet it is this thread that must be followed to understand a significant – though not exclusive, but very real and well-documented – aspect of contemporary Senegalese mobility.
The groundnut basin: the historical heartland of emigration
The starting point of this story is neither recent nor, strictly speaking, climate-related. It dates back to the agricultural crisis of the 1970s and 1980s in the groundnut-growing region comprising Diourbel, Kaolack, Fatick, Kaffrine, Louga and Thiès, when the fall in groundnut prices and the withdrawal of subsidies for agricultural inputs left hundreds of thousands of households in a precarious situation. The ongoing soil degradation, already underway at the time, transformed this economic fragility into a structural constraint.
Research carried out over several decades by the Research Institute for Development at the Niakhar observation site reveals how this degradation has shaped local migration patterns, generation after generation. Seasonal migration – initially undertaken by men, but increasingly involving younger people, including girls – is not described here as an exodus or an abandonment of the land, but as a fully-fledged coping strategy: a way for households to maintain an economic balance that the land alone can no longer guarantee.
This is a point that the history of migration in Senegal sometimes tends to overlook. In the groundnut basin, migration thus appears less as a mere individual choice than as one of the strategies developed by households in the face of the increasing fragility of their livelihoods. And this response does not stop at the country’s internal borders. Internal routes to Dakar, Mbour or Touba exist alongside – within the same families and sometimes among the same individuals at different stages of their lives – regional routes to The Gambia, and irregular departures to Europe, the peaks of which often coincide, as documented by Dialogue Migration, with the major religious and cultural gatherings that, each year, re-energise the family and community networks involved in migration.
The coast: when environmental degradation means there is no longer even the possibility of returning
On the coast, in Saint-Louis, the link between environmental degradation and migration takes an even more radical form: that of the impossibility of returning. In the Gandiol region, south of the city, saltwater intrusion has rendered land formerly used for market gardening unsuitable for cultivation. In the Gandiol region, south of Saint-Louis, saltwater intrusion has profoundly affected land formerly used for market gardening, whilst several villages have been forced to be left or relocated.
A project called ‘recul stratégique’ on the Langue de Barbarie, implemented with the support of the World Bank and the French Development Agency, alone involves the resettlement of around 10,000 people. What this situation illustrates is a fact that is often overlooked in the debate on Senegalese migration: land degradation not only drives people away, it also robs them – sometimes permanently – of the possibility of returning.
For a migrant from these areas, return – though presented in many cooperation programmes, including those linking Senegal to Spain or France, as the natural culmination of a successful migration journey – effectively loses its meaning when the home village no longer exists.
Circular migration, climate migration: the same context, two perspectives
Senegal is currently experimenting with so-called ‘circular’ migration models with Spain, where seasonal workers are no longer viewed as exiles but as temporary agents of development, expected to return and contribute to the local economy at the end of their regulated contracts.
These schemes rest on an implicit assumption: that there exists, back home, an economically viable area to which one can return to invest what has been learnt or earned abroad.
It is precisely this assumption that land degradation undermines. A circular migrant from the groundnut-growing region or Gandiol does not return to a neutral void: they return to soil which, from one season to the next, continues to lose fertility or area. Without massive investment in land restoration and adaptation to drought, policies on circular migration or return are likely to come up against a biophysical reality that no bilateral agreement alone can address.
What organisations on the ground are observing
The link between land and migration is not merely a news sense : it lies at the heart of the advocacy work carried out for years by the International Organisation for Migration, which recently pointed out, on the sidelines of COP17, that land degradation deprives people of the very possibility of choosing between staying, leaving safely, or returning with dignity. In Senegal, organisations such as Enda Pronat, drawing on forty years of action research with rural communities, have been making the same observation from the ground: without an agroecological transition, without securing pastoral land rights, and without decentralised funding mechanisms for the most affected areas, land-related migratory pressure will continue to mount, whether or not it is explicitly identified as such in official migration statistics.
A regional programme supported by the Green Climate Fund – worth $222 million to restore 1.4 million hectares across eight Sahel countries, including Senegal – already exists on paper. However, the exact share that will go to the country, and the areas that will actually benefit from it, remain unclear to this day. Until this investment is localised – until it explicitly targets the groundnut-growing region or the northern coast, two areas whose migration history is directly linked to the condition of their land – it will remain a commitment in principle rather than a real mechanism for reducing forced departures.
A youth already negotiating with the land, not just with borders
To address this issue solely through the prism of migration routes and visa policies is to overlook the first, often invisible, negotiation that every young person from the groundnut basin or the coastal region undergoes: that with their own land, even before any agreement with an embassy or a migrant smuggler.
It is this very negotiation – with the soil, with the climate, with a plot’s capacity to feed a family for one more season – that very often takes precedence over and determines all the others. Environmental factors will continue to weigh heavily on the conditions that influence migration.
Sources: Senegal Court of Auditors (2024); UNCCD; National Report on Land Degradation Neutrality; FAO; Global Forest Resources Assessment; IRD, research at the Niakhar observation site; Enda Pronat; French Development Agency; World Bank; IOM; COP17.
