Susan's Bay, a coastal settlement in Freetown, Sierra Leone
By courtesy of Achilles Kallergis
Far-right populism, which until recently disavowed climate change, has embraced apocalyptic scenarios of overwhelming numbers of migrants and refugees from the Global South fleeing environmental risk to seek refuge in Europe. Countering this misleading claim requires reframing environmental migration not as a threat to border security but as a localized consequence of climate change.
Perhaps more than any other issue today, climate migration engenders primal fears across the political spectrum. Driven by the juxtaposition of migration and climate change, with each already perceived as a threatening crisis, discussions emphasize the need for action given the prospect of unprecedented numbers of climate migrants and refugees in the future. Scenarios are equally fueled by the ever-present images of displaced populations fleeing extreme weather events and by wide-ranging forecasts of the number of people who will be moving for climate-related reasons. The United Nations International Organization for Migration states that the world will experience from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050. It notes that the most cited forecast of 200 million is almost equal to today’s total number of international migrants, which is less than 4 percent of the world’s population. However, the estimate that usually makes the headlines is that of 1 billion migrants, which is expected to be more than 10 percent of the world’s population in 2050.
Experts have criticized the validity and scientific rigor of many of these forecasts. While scientific models constantly improve, scientists caution about the complexity of the environment–migration nexus. Migration models are based on assumptions about future demographic, socioeconomic, and development trends, migratory behaviors, and changes in the environment. Experts warn that models are not prophecies but politicians and the media often treat forecast migration numbers as oracular certainties. What is particularly conspicuous in today’s deeply polarized political atmosphere is how these hyperbolic predictions feed into a growing consensus across the political aisle. The shared narrative depicts climate migration as the next apocalypse.
Such apprehension is not surprising for those who have been concerned about the devastating effects of climate change for a long time. Migration and displacement are perceived as intrinsic consequences of irreversible human-induced damage to Earth’s ecosystem. Continuing down the path the world is on will exacerbate inequalities, force billions to move, and keep many more trapped in dangerous locations. But the embrace of this narrative by far-right populists, who have denied and continue to question the effects of climate change, is a startling shift. It is centered around the paradox of climate denialism coexisting with fears of future tsunamis of climate refugees. In this case, fear is not materialized through the cause but through the consequence. It becomes vivid in the prognostications about billions of others migrating in disorderly fashion from the Global South to seek refuge in Europe and elsewhere due to environmental hardship. There, these newcomers will clog welfare systems; dilute racial, cultural, and national traits; and, somewhat ironically, lead to the degradation of local natural resources. According to this view, stopping the tide of climate migrants demands impermeable borders as well as efforts to dissuade and contain movement. In the words of Jordan Bardella, spokesperson of France’s far-right National Rally, “Borders are the environment’s greatest ally… it is through them that we will save the planet.”
There is little value in arguing why Bardella is wrong. What Joe Turner and Dan Bailey label as “ecobordering”—the casting of immigration control as a form of environmental protection—will contribute little to saving the planet. After all, climate migrants and their poor sending countries bear little responsibility for the historical emissions of advanced economies that are the culprit in global warming. Reframing the narrative on environmental mobility requires us to emphasize why visions of large-scale migratory movements between regions contradict reality. At present, there is no indication of climate change leading to mass migration from Africa to Europe or generally from South to North regions. On the contrary, empirical evidence and rigorous future estimates point to climate variability resulting mostly in internal migration, with movements that are short in distance and duration, often from rural to urban areas.
These findings should not cause relief, however. A crisis is well underway but it is one manifested much more locally within the world’s most vulnerable regions. Research I recently conducted in African cities, in collaboration with local slum communities of the Slum Dwellers International community network, points to high levels of climate vulnerability due to the precarious conditions in informal settlements, where half of urbanites live and rural migrants move into. People are thus moving toward environmental risk that is compounded by poverty, overcrowding, lack of services and housing insecurity, and the locational and topographic characteristics of settlements. For the affected communities, this leads to maladaptation, simultaneously trapping people in place and perpetuating a cycle of displacement. Climate migration takes place in parallel to the much larger transformation from rural to urban society in Africa. The number of forecast environmental migrants is dwarfed by the future rural-to-urban migration and the natural population growth that will occur in African cities, which are expected to grow to be the world’s largest urban agglomerations by the century’s end.
It is therefore crucial that European policymakers reposition environmental mobility as an issue of grave concern but not as an immediate threat to Europe’s borders. They can do so by paying more attention to the growing scientific evidence pointing to the localized migration effects of climate change. Beyond its own adaptation and mitigation strategies, Europe needs to support efforts to increase the resilience of vulnerable populations in Global South countries. Finally, it is crucial to acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change—a global bad that advanced economies are primarily responsible for creating and that low-income nations bear the brunt of—can be addressed solely through concerted collective efforts and cooperation.
Forty years ago, Jack Hirshleifer, used a fictitious circular island, Anarchia, to explain how in the absence of government, the level of protection from flooding for all islanders depended on the lowest dike that each family created to protect its individual property. This imagery is particularly appropriate in the context of a changing climate in an unequal world. Addressing the consequences of environmental change, inevitably including migration and displacement, requires those of us in the Global North to think not only about our actions but also about how the level of protection of vulnerable populations will determine the planet’s collective well-being.
International Organization for Migration. A Complex Nexus. Accessed on April 18, 2023, https://www.iom.int/complexnexus#:~:text=Future%20forecasts%20vary%20from%2025,estimate%20of%20international%20migrants%20worldwide
France 24, “Le Pen’s National Rally goes green in bid for European election votes,” April 20, 2019 https://www.france24.com/en/20190420-le-pen-national-rally-front-environment-european-elections-france
https://climatemobilities.org/
Achilles Kallergis is assistant professor and director of the project on Cities and Human Mobility at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, The New School, New York City. In 2023, he was fellow at the IWM.
