From Earthquakes to Wildfires: Chile’s Hidden Climate Displacement Crisis
By Ameera Saba
When examining the forces that affect displaced people, climate change is often overlooked. Being less visible and harder to combat directly, climate can be easy to dismiss as a driving factor. However, its impact should not be underestimated, as it plays a major role in displacement frequency and severity within a country. These dynamics are evident in Chile’s current crisis, where climate change has significantly affected both internally displaced people and external refugees living within the country.
Internal Displacement
Chile is one of the most geographically diverse countries in the world, accredited to its length that spans over 40° latitude. This, however, does not come without its downsides, as wider geographic diversity exposes people to a wider variety of climate hazards. As of 2021, the World Bank ranked Chile 29th out of 181 for most climate-vulnerable countries. This statistic has only grown more evident over time, as 5.6 million people have reportedly been internally displaced between 2010 and 2025 due to natural disasters alone, placing climate as the overwhelmingly dominant cause for displacement in Chile.
The majority of internal displacement in Chile is due to earthquakes. While there is no direct link between earthquake frequency and climate change, climate change still influences earthquake-based displacement by greatly exacerbating its impacts. An example of this lies in the mountainous regions of Chile. As the Earth’s surface grows warmer, more water evaporates, leading to an increase in heavy precipitation at higher altitudes. Not only does an increase in precipitation mean more torrential rain, flash floods, and heavy snow that ruin homes, heavy precipitation also loosens the ground. Areas with unstable ground are far more dangerous during earthquakes, as landslides are more likely to occur and soft earth under buildings weakens their foundations, making structures more prone to collapse.
By Chile’s coast, the interaction between earthquakes and climate poses a different threat to citizens as seismic activity can trigger tsunamis. Roughly 80% of tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, where shifting sections of the ocean floor create massive deadly waves that stretch far inland and can devastate a city in minutes. Chile has an extensive coastline of 6,435 km (4,000 miles) that accounts for ~45% of its border, it also has a narrow shape with a mountain range that pushes population density toward central and coastal regions. These factors combined make Chileans very vulnerable to tsunamis.
While Chile has established a strong tsunami warning and evacuation system over time, climate change threatens its future effectiveness. Rising global sea levels, driven by melting ice caps, mean tsunamis can travel farther inland, destroying more homes, displacing more people, and reaching areas that are unequipped to handle their effects. In modern Chile, seismic activity and its respective tsunamis have been the leading cause of internal displacement, with notable events including the displacement of around 2 million people in 2010, 2 million more people between 2014 and 2015, and the evacuation 1.5 million people in 2025.
Earthquakes are not the only cause of internal displacement, as Chile has seen an alarming rise in wildfires and droughts due to climate change. Chile’s climate varies greatly by region, with nearly half the country experiencing dry seasons and “fire weather,” a term used to outline the temperature, humidity, and wind conditions wildfires need to ignite and spread.
Chile has always experienced wildfires, but recent years have shown a drastic increase in both their size and frequency. Since 2010, Chile has undergone an intense period of drought, and in 2022 the country’s surface temperature growth rate jumped from increasing by 0.15°C per decade to 0.18°C per decade. This shift is already being felt in the warmer regions of Chile, where hotter temperatures further dry out drought-impacted land and vegetation, making it easier for fires to catch and grow. In mid-January of 2026, one of the largest wildfire disasters Chile has experienced in years began, destroying over 1,000 homes and forcing 52,000 people to evacuate in days.
The Chilean government responded by declaring a state of catastrophe to focus efforts around containing the fires, setting up temporary shelters and using military forces to coordinate firefighting efforts. Despite this, especially dry and windy conditions made it extremely difficult to reign in the spread, prolonging the firefighting process. Studies on this disaster attribute this to climate change, which made “fire weather” conditions three times more likely to occur. A conclusion reinforced by the remarks of Miguel Castillo, the Director of the Forest Fire Engineering Laboratory at the University of Chile, who highlighted that year’s fire season “almost [tripled] the amount of affected area,” despite the actual number of wildfires being “within normal margins, even below average.” This spells out a concerning pattern for future internal displacement causes in Chile, where less wildfires may need to be triggered to cause the same amount of damage, and growing extreme climate conditions would make them harder to control.
External Displacement Impacts
Yet the impacts of climate-driven displacement in Chile do not stop with Chilean citizens, as migrant and refugee communities often face even greater environmental vulnerability. As of 2024, foreign nationals make up around 8.8% of the population in Chile, the second-highest percentage in all of Latin America. The majority of migrants and refugees come from other South American countries, with nearly half consisting of Venezuelans forcibly displaced due to local instability. Although Chile has long held relatively lax policies around migration that allow for a large influx of people, regularization pathways granting legal status, work permits, and protections are scarce and difficult to obtain. At the same time, Chile faces a severe housing deficit that makes it difficult for migrants to find or afford legal housing, pushing many into informal settlements as a result.
In many cases, these informal settlements in Chile have left migrants especially vulnerable to environmental disasters. Rapid and unregulated construction often leaves housing structurally weak and prone to collapse. These settlements are also frequently built in isolated or dangerous areas, such as steep hillsides or the outskirts of cities, making assistance more difficult during emergencies and increasing chances of exposure to floods, wildfires, and landslides. Communities within this housing are often overcrowded, and buildings lack proper ventilation or cooling systems. This risks triggering heat-related illnesses such as heatstroke, severe dehydration, the exacerbation of pre-existing medical conditions, or even death. These events are only expected to increase in frequency and severity as climate change pushes the environment to further extremes.
For much of history South America has been a region plagued by conflict. When confronted with an immediately palpable crisis such as political instability or economic unrest, it becomes difficult to focus on the slow but growing abnormalities in the surrounding environment. Yet across the world, record-breaking temperatures, floods, droughts, and other extreme weather events are appearing on an increasingly regular basis, disproportionally affecting the more climate-vulnerable places in the world, such as Chile. From the uncontrollable wildfires and the growing levels of damage caused by earthquakes, climate change acts as a subtle form of violence, gradually destabilizing communities, destroying homes, and forcing displacement over time.
The writer is a research and advocacy intern, covering climate displacement and migration at Displaced International.
