The Climate Refugee Who Became a Climate Scientist: A Story From the Frontlines of Change

Fatima Al-Hassan fled drought in Sudan, earned a PhD in climate science in Germany, and now studies the droughts that drove her from her homeland. Here is her story.

The data that Fatima Al-Hassan analyzes on her computer screen in the climate modeling laboratory of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel shows, in the dry language of millimeters and probability distributions, the rainfall deficits that have been affecting the Sahelian belt since the 1970s. She knows what those deficits mean in human terms in a way that most climate scientists who study the Sahel do not, because she was born into one of them.

Al-Hassan, 36, left Sudan with her family in 2006, when she was seventeen, during the prolonged drought that contributed to the environmental and political collapse that preceded the Darfur crisis. Her family's pastoral lifestyle — cattle herding in the semi-arid zone south of Khartoum — had become economically unsustainable as rainfall seasons shortened and water sources became unreliable. 'We didn't leave because of war,' she says. 'We left because the land stopped working. The war came after, for many of the same reasons.'

She arrived in Germany through family connections, learned German in a year through a combination of formal classes and the particular linguistic immersion that necessity produces, and eventually qualified for university admission. Her academic path — through meteorology at the University of Hamburg, through a master's in climate dynamics at Kiel, and a PhD that modeled the contribution of Saharan dust to Atlantic hurricane intensity — was not initially planned as a response to her personal history. It became one.

'When you understand the science of what happened to your home, you understand it differently than when you read about it in a paper,' she says. 'The data is real to me in a way that I think it is not real to colleagues who have only ever experienced drought as an object of study. I am glad this makes me a better scientist. I am not glad about what made it so.'