Who Counts as a Climate Migrant?
JULY 20, 2023
FEATURE
By Kerilyn Schewel
As climate change threatens to upend societies around the world, concerns about mass climate migration are becoming widespread. As far back as 1992, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned “the gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration as millions are displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and severe drought.” In recent years, tens of millions of people have been displaced annually by natural disasters (which can be, but are not always, related to climate change), and disasters often prompt more internal displacement than do conflicts, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Increasingly unpredictable patterns of rainfall and drought are straining the livelihoods of smallholder farmers around the world. Some governments have embarked on planned relocation of communities threatened by rising seas and natural disasters. As climate change becomes more extreme, the consequences will continue unfolding. Researchers and analysts have repeatedly tried to quantify how many people will be uprooted by climate change, with estimates ranging from the hundreds of millions to well more than 1 billion. In the process, they have created a new category of migrants sometimes referred to as environmental migrants, climate refugees, and increasingly, climate migrants.
However, these terms are nebulous and, crucially, carry no legal meaning. No government currently offers a legal migration pathway based solely on an individual’s exposure to climate change, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has made clear that fleeing the impacts of climate change is not sufficient grounds for receiving refugee status, which is limited to people escaping persecution. The use of these terms, particularly “climate refugee,” has prompted contentious debates among academics, activists, and others.
Nevertheless, the concept of climate migration remains influential in policy-oriented research, most notably in forecasting future scenarios. The World Bank’s influential Groundswell reports estimate that without serious efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, 216 million people could become climate migrants within their own countries by 2050. The African Climate Mobility Initiative projects that in Africa alone, the number of internal climate migrants could reach up to 113 million by 2050. These numbers are worrisome—partly by design. Reports often highlight the worst-case scenarios to galvanize international action on climate change. More sensational analysis tends to conflate the number of people living in areas seriously threatened by rising sea levels and other environmental threats with the number of future climate migrants. This neglects the potential for adaptation measures—like building sea walls, creating new food systems, or using air conditioning—that can help keep people in place. It also neglects the reality that societies are already remarkably mobile. Even in the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, people are already on the move internally and internationally for work, housing, education, family reunification, security, adventure, and other reasons. Rather than forecasting how many people will be uprooted by climate change, analysts might instead ask how climate change will reshape existing patterns of migration and immobility.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/who-is-a-climate-migrant
