A climate refugee: Myth or reality?

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced its sixth assessment report earlier this week, media reports again abound with predictions of millions, perhaps billions, of people soon wanting to migrate to the Global North to escape flooding, desertification and drought in the Global South.

The IPCC’s scenarios for global warming and its consequences for life on earth are dire indeed. ?

However, the warnings of mass climate migrations are based on unclear assumptions. The logic seems to be as follows: since the humanity’s future is hanging in the balance, people are bound to migrate in huge numbers to find safer areas to live.

A report recently produced for the Swedish government by Mathias Czaika and Rainer Münz, Climate Change, Displacement, Mobility and Migration: The State of Evidence, Future Scenarios, Policy Options, puts the calamitous scenarios for mass climate migrations in a scientific context. Analysing data produced by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the report shows that out of the 344 million people displaced by extreme weather conditions and natural disasters between 2008 and 2021, “only 6 million people did not return to the subregion or place from which they were displaced”. This is less than 2 per cent.

As for the effects of the gradual change of habitat, the report concludes that so far, ?their effects on migration and mobility are impossible to determine. Namely, we cannot distinguish the process of urbanisation, which is occurring independently of the changes of climate, from people having to move to cities because of their livelihoods being eroded by floods and droughts.

Other authors have found the same uncertainty. An article by Abel et al, ‘Climate, conflict and forced migration’, published in Global Environmental Change in 2019, stated that ‘to the best of our knowledge, there is no scientific study that has empirically established the links between climate change, conflict and migration and identifies the causal pattern in a convincing manner.’

A literature review compiled for the UK government in 2021 demonstrated that there was no upward trend in weather shock-related migration. It also showed that ‘there are no rigorous global estimates of the number of people displaced by or migrating in response to weather shocks or climate change, and high-end projections of future climate-related migration are not considered credible.’

On the contrary, the same review showed that people affected by poverty face barriers to movement, a finding replicated by the article by H. Benveniste et al, ‘Climate change increases resource-constrained international immobility’, published in Nature Climate Change in 2022. The latter research includes a calculation according to which the climate change induces decreases in emigration of people with lowest income levels.

What does this all mean? Be extra-attentive when someone presents you with exorbitant numbers of humans allegedly arriving at your doorstep as a result of global warming. These numbers are probably false and they are certainly backed by no credible analysis.

This is not at all to deny that climate change is a serious threat to humanity and that it is man / woman made. But the fact is that we simply don’t know how it is going to affect human mobility. There are too many uncertainties to make reliable predictions.

What is much more certain is that with political will and sufficient resources, countries can take adaptive measures to adapt to climate-related shocks and to the gradual degradation of the environment.