Climate migration myths

The topic of climate change and migration attracts a strong following from the media and produces an increase in academic literature and reports from international governmental institutions and NGOs. It poses questions that point to the core of social and environmental developments of the 21st century, such as environmental and climate justice as well as North–South relations. This article examines the main features of the debate and presents a genealogy of the discussion on climate change and migration since the 1980s. It presents an analysis of different framings and lines of argument, such as the securitization of climate change and connections to development studies and adaptation research. This article also presents methodological and conceptual questions, such as how to conceive interactions between migration and climate change. As legal aspects have played a crucial role since the beginning of the debate, different legal strands are considered here, including soft law and policy-oriented approaches. These approaches relate to questions of voluntary or forced migration and safeguarding the rights of environmental migrants. This article introduces theoretical concepts that are prompted by analyzing climate change as an " imaginative resource " and by questioning power relations related to climate-change discourses, politics, and practices. This article recommends a re-politicization of the debate, questions the often victimizing, passive picture of the " drowning " climate-change migrant, and criticizes alarmist voices that can trigger perceived security interests of countries of the Global North. Decolonizing and critical perspectives analyze facets of the debate that have racist, depoliticizing, or naturalizing tendencies or exoticize the " other. "

2020

The relationship between climate change and migration is much more subtle and complex than 'clickbait' headlines suggest, write Kayly Ober and Patrick Sakdapolrak

Migration Policy Institute Feature, 2010

Most scientists agree that global warming affects ecological systems, but there is less certainty about its social effects, especially regarding human mobility. Yet this has not prevented a number of scholars, multilateral agencies, and nongovernmental organizations from making alarming predictions that climate change processes will trigger historically unprecedented waves of mass migration. The more widely cited estimates for the number of people displaced by 2050 range from 50 million (UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security) to 200 million (International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Stern Review). If the higher estimates pan out, climate change-related migration could dwarf current numbers of refugees and internally displaced people-about 45 million and 9 million by United Nations estimates, respectively. While there are no scientifically verified estimates of the number of people that will be displaced by climate change, several studies by UN agencies, IOM, and NGOs, including an influential report published in 2009, already show evidence that environmentally induced migration is occurring. Also, despite controversy surrounding the specifics of climate change data, there is no evidence to contradict the expected trend of continued global warming for at least a few decades to come. This article will examine the complex links between climate change and migration, how and where these links influence current and future migration patterns, and some of the problems with predicting future flows. It will also outline some current policy approaches and look at where the debate is headed. The Climate Change-Migration Nexus Migration has helped humans cope with environmental changes, such as droughts and floods, for centuries. The frequency, severity, and duration of such changes affect the broad types of migration patterns-temporary, permanent, internal, or internationalthat take place. The prevailing tendency thus far has been toward more circular, internal movements of people from mostly rural to urban areas and within national boundaries or regions. These trends are evident, for example, in the seasonal labor migration of Central American, Mexican, and West African farmers to compensate for lower agricultural productivity in rural areas, as well as in the temporary displacement of thousands of Bangladeshis to their capital, Dhaka, in response to annual monsoon floods. However, severe environmental damage, whether natural or manmade, can leave populations with little recourse but to move permanently and en-masse. This happened in the 1930s Dust Bowl in the Great Plains of the United States. Below-average rainfall, accompanied by the Great Depression, resulted in the widespread failure of small farms and the migration of about 300,000 "Okies" to California. Currently, people are beginning to leave some small island nations in the Pacific with low elevations because the islands are suffering high rates of coastal erosion and experiencing rising sea levels. Environmental degradation is also increasingly common in those areas, such as in West Africa and Haiti, where depleted agricultural land can no

Routledge International Handbook of Human Migration Studies, 2nd Ed. (S. Nawyn & S. Gold, Eds.)

It is now widely recognized that climate change will reconfigure our physical and social landscapes in ways that we are just beginning to understand, and that it will directly and indirectly influence human migration patterns across geographic regions and the socio-economic spectrum. Exactly how climate change will affect migration, what climate-related migration will look like, and how scholars might go about studying it, however, remain points of contention. In this chapter, we identify some key threads in the burgeoning literature on climate change and human migration, including the influence of climate change on migration decisions and patterns, the challenges of empirically measuring and predicting the scale of climate migration, the likely patterns climate migration will take, and some of the looming governance and human rights questions posed by climate migration. Additionally, because both climate change and migration occur within a dynamic and highly unequal social, political, and economic landscape, we highlight some of the ways in which some communities are rendered more vulnerable than others in the face of both climate change and climate migration, as well as the ways in which such vulnerability is produced and perpetuated.

In early 2011, the popular German weekly Der Spiegel asked on its website: “Where are all the environmental refugees?“ (cf. Bojanowski, 2011). It was referring to a prediction made in 2005 by the United Nations University (UNU) and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) that warned of the existence of up to 50 million environmental refugees by 2010. Der Spiegel noted that, despite the doomsday prophecies of these UN agencies, there is no real evidence of changes in global migratory patterns and behavior, specifically in the form of growing migration rates in the context of climate change-related environmental change. In this article, Der Spiegel journalists picked up on a strand of debate that is being pursued in a number of different settings: the relation between global climate change and migration. For several decades, this debate has featured prominently in many contexts. It comes up regularly at international climate policy events (for example at COP 15 in Copenhagen) and also fuels public debates on potential societal impacts of global climate change. It is regularly referred to in mass media, as well as policy circles and public statements of politicians. At the same time, the issue has been subject to an intense debate in different scientific communities, from the natural sciences, to geography, the political sciences, and migration research. The debate and its critique served as a starting point for conceptualizing a workshop entitled Denaturalizing Climate Change: Migration, Mobilities and Spaces that took place at the artec Sustainability Research Center, University of Bremen in October 2013. The aim was to revisit the nexus between climate change and human mobility, employing innovative and, above all, more politicized approaches. Among the broader debates on climate change adaptation, there is evidence of both over-politicization and a de-politicization of the far-reaching social, political and legal consequences of global climate change. On the one hand, research from various disciplines often focuses on the formal transnational negotiations and international climate policy institutions. This growing research field is, intrinsically, highly politicized. On the other hand, debates are de-politicized from a more theoretical point of view. Very often, questions on the social impacts of environmental change are detached from the political and social contexts in which those impacts come to play, and from the debates around climate justice that infuse all climate change negotiations. In our view, environmental change is always simultaneously a natural and a social phenomenon. This applies both to the causes of change and to societal responses, including increasing mobility. In line with conceptual frameworks that refer to social natures (Castree & Braun, 2001) and the societal relationships with nature (Görg, 2004), we argue that it is important to consider the social constructions and cultural readings of environmental change. Specifically, our aim has been to analyze the evolving co-production of social order and natural order with respect to the relationship between environmental change and human mobility. In contrast, the current debates on growing refugee flows in the context of global warming often neglect or cover up this process of co-production and conceptualize nature as being detached from social and political processes.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, 2016

The topic of climate change and migration attracts a strong following from the media and produces an increase in academic literature and reports from international governmental institutions and NGOs. It poses questions that point to the core of social and environmental developments of the 21st century, such as environmental and climate justice as well as North–South relations.This article examines the main features of the debate and presents a genealogy of the discussion on climate change and migration since the 1980s. It presents an analysis of different framings and lines of argument, such as the securitization of climate change and connections to development studies and adaptation research. This article also presents methodological and conceptual questions, such as how to conceive interactions between migration and climate change. As legal aspects have played a crucial role since the beginning of the debate, different legal strands are considered here, including soft law and poli...

2021

The debate and its critique served as a starting point for conceptualizing a workshop entitled Denaturalizing Climate Change: Migration, Mobilities and Spaces that took place at the artec Sustainability Research Center, University of Bremen in October 2013. The aim was to revisit the nexus between climate change and human mobility, employing innovative and, above all, more politicized approaches.