WVXU: Environmental crises contributing to refugee flight
UC professors Tomasz Stepinski and Leila Rodriguez explain how changes in climate and land use are driving migration patterns
WVXU spoke to two University of Cincinnati professors to understand how environmental factors are contributing to the global refugee crisis.
UC geography professor Tomasz Stepinski and Leila Rodriguez, an associate professor of anthropology, explained how changes in land use, climate change and extreme poverty are driving people to leave their homelands.
"When you cut a significant portion of the forest, the climate changes. And when the climate changes, you may not be able to grow certain crops and this may be a contributing factor to the crisis," Stepinski told WVXU.
Stepinski used high-resolution satellite images from the European Space Agency to track changing global land use between 1992 and 2015. The map shows how 22 percent of the Earth's habitable surface has been altered in measurable ways, primarily from forest to agriculture.
Rodriguez teaches a UC Honors class on the global refugee crisis. In particular, students examined how Germany absorbed more than 1 million refugees since 2015.
"It's not an easy answer, but he solution I think is global management of migration where the burden is shared more evenly," Rodriguez told WVXU.
Featured image at top: Central American migrants carry their belongings over their heads while crossing the Suchiate River from Guatemala to Mexico. Photo/Santiago Billy/AP
A portion of UC geography professor Tomasz Stepinski's new world map shows changing landscapes in North and South America. White indicates little or no change. Darker shades indicate the highest rate of change in each category. Graphic/Tomasz Stepinski/UC
Related Stories
UC professor leads film students to the future
April 6, 2026
As a kid, at the age of 10, Marty Schiff’s dad gave him a Kodak Brownie movie camera, and that led to a lifetime of creating stories on film. He spent his summers with that camera, making eight-millimeter movies, with a camera that taught him how to thread a projector, change the film in a closet, and tell stories with the medium he loved. “I always wanted to go to Hollywood,” Schiff says. So later he did, with $200 in his pocket, and began a career that has spanned acting, directing, producing—pretty much everything with the exception of costumes (“I’m not really good with a sewing machine,” he says).
Scientists discover how snakes stand upright without limbs
April 3, 2026
Smithsonian magazine highlights a study co-authored by UC Professor Bruce Jayne, an expert in snake locomotion, about how snakes stand upright without arms or legs.
On track: Hoffman Honors Scholar studies public transit
April 2, 2026
Public transit is where Zane Sawyer’s lifelong passion for travel meets his commitment to making an impact. The University of Cincinnati first-year geography major in the College of Arts & Sciences and member of the second cohort of Hoffman Honors Scholars (HHS) has hit the ground running, designing a research project intended to capture both how public transit works and how its users perceive it.