This morning's short video has now been published. In it I argue that whatever our politicians say, migration is going to increase - because climate change guarantees it will.
The transcript is:
Migration has been a major issue in this general election.
Right throughout the campaign it's been raised by all the politicians of the major parties, plus Reform. And they're all entirely missing the point. Which is that migration is going to get very much worse, worldwide.
Why? Because of climate change.
Climate change is creating extreme heat, additional cold, flooding and drought.
It's not predictable.
That's the whole problem with climate change. We don't know what's going to happen.
But what we can guarantee, as a consequence of those conditions, is that people are going to move: move from vulnerable areas, like some parts of the Middle East, where water is already literally running out.
And they've got to have somewhere to go.
And that is the UK, like it or not, in the future. And that's not being discussed in this campaign, and it should be, because this is the humanitarian crisis of the 21st century.
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To that I would add various conflicts throughout the world, which surely must exacerbate the situation.
And be exacerbated by the situation.
Living in Ireland for the past nine years I have seen an increase in non-EU migrants coming into the country (me included, before anyone says!). But attitudes have hardened against the flow during the past few years.
Briefly, to take one example, at the start of the Ukraine war, most people sympathised with them. We had trollies outside supermarkets for food collection. Accommodation and English lessons were arranged, a financial allowance paid. Then, as numbers increased, I heard talk about how the government were treating them far better than the indigenous population. Homelessness, hospital waiting lists, bad housing etc are all increasing and creating fertile ground for the right wing activists to the extent that buildings used for temporary migrant housing have been burnt down.
As Olaf Scholz is reported in the Guardian today:
“We have to work very hard to give security to people about the future and we have to tackle all the relevant questions that are important for them.”
These included labour rights, global security, climate protection, a world shaped by artificial intelligence and an “international order … which is something you can rely on”.
If things aren’t working for the ‘average’ person, you are asking for a Farage to step forward etc.! The Tories have brought it on themselves and Labour might do the same in five years time.
Dr. Hein de Haas has en excellent blog explaining migration matters in a much-needed level-headed manner:
http://heindehaas.blogspot.com/
Plus the rise in sea levels resulting from global heating and the melting of ice caps, which threatens to drown many of the world’s major cities including London, New York, Shanghai, and the drowning and/or salinization of many of the best agricultural lands (the Fens spring to mind).
There has been a long debate between maximalist and minimalist groups of demographers as to the impacts of environmental change on migration, between Myers and Black factions.
The wider political impacts of citing of large potential migration figures by academics has a major influence on popular discussion, such as this blog thread.
Why campaigning climate groups are motivated in quoting massive unproven figures is not entirely clear, but some humanitarian groups have responded big time. Christian Aid’s 2007 report cited 1 billion displaced by 2050. Cornell researchers have guessed at 2bn by 2100. And these figures are guesses.
Basically the maximalists use neo-Malthusian projections, whereas minimalists see the capacity of individuals and communities to respond to a changing environment as crucial, with human agency producing mitigation and adaptation – plus there is local resilience. People don’t want to move from a settled existence if avoidable, and many simply cannot.
We all know the vulnerability of people living in densely populated, low lying regions such as the Nile Delta, east Asian river basins and Bangladesh deltas, plus the African Sahel where droughts are virtually continuous these days.
Anyone living in a Mediterranean climate, so Australia, Western USA, and the entirety of Southern Europe is also very vulnerable, especially to drought and fires. California alone has 40m people.
Heat deaths are accelerating, as the thousand estimated to have died at this year’s Hajj shows.
Then we have temperate forest fires that were totally unpredicted as a push factor for migration. Canada, NE USA and much of Northern Europe and Siberia have huge exposure to extensive forest fires.
The extreme right wing view is that all these people will be heading half way round the planet to invade and take over western industrial nations, as part of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy.
This myth actually does have some wider political traction, but it is a malicious trope used to promote right wing populism, and authoritarianism, by bad actors and neofascist nutjobs.
That doesn’t mean it won’t be pushed hard by anti-migration factions.
The irony is that there is a neo-colonial mindset here, that is just ignored.
The simple fact is that people tend to resist permanent migration from their home areas as long as possible, and then prefer to move the shortest distance possible from their place of origin, seeking to remain within their local culture and social connections if they can. Ravenstein’s laws of migration verify this.
Practically, the pressures creating mass migration can be eased by peace keeping, so actually seeking to solve regional conflicts, as these strongly overlay climate pressures as the main push factor, especially in the Sahel. The global weapons industry is strongly implicated in perpetuating these wars and associated persecution.
Then we have the option of investing in amelioration, mitigation and adaptation measures.
Perhaps too much to hope for, given that 20% of UK flood prevention no longer functions, down to lack of maintenance.
All these measures need funding, and it would behove the industrial north and developed nations to increase their aid budgets to assist the southern nations to adapt to climate change.
I see the critical initiative as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals programme which ought to be underpinning much more of our foreign policy actions as the main hope.
One of my biggest fears is that the lurch in Europe towards identity nationalism could transform itself into eco fascism. A move away from a Romantic style fantasy towards a Gothic horror story.
I think that in Africa the struggle for resources is something that is already here. The last 2 decades of violence in Darfur is not exceptional but a potential norm. The traditional means that local communities distributed economic rights is completely gone.
It’s certainly true in the case of war or local environmental factors those affected tend to move the shortest distance possible to the nearest place of relative safety. Hence why Turkey has around 4 million refugees.
But will that “nearby” continue to hold when much wider areas become uninhabitable? And what if the ocean conveyor belt which makes Europe much milder than it “should be” shuts down (which some research suggests could happen within a decade), starting a new ice age forcing many Europeans to move south?
Too many unknowns and too many politicians don’t want to know.
Your last sentence summarises this situation well
@Geejay
Yes, it will.
Recent research, both in Sahel areas of increasingly frequent drought, and in Indian flood basins, conclude that people prefer to move temporarily out of risk areas, rather than permanently, where that is possible, and then resettle once environmental and war hazards have passed.
Short distance moves are the preferred pattern, if these are possible.
In unstable environments in Indian flood plains social institutions do exist which even allow for people to resettle if their land has been washed away, in land distribution customs.
Displacement due to extreme events tends to shock people’s ability to migrate long distances. There is a prohibitive cost of moving greater distances, and people just cannot afford it, and may well be traumatised by sudden events like floods anyway.
Similarly, recent research into changes in Caribbean cyclone patterns also concludes that people prefer to move back into their home areas, even when the frequency and magnitude of hurricanes has increased.
There is also research into the major reasons for migrating to Dhaka’s slums.
These were a lack of land, employment and income opportunities in the rural ‘push’ areas.
Environmental hazards such as drought, riverbank erosion, cyclones and flood were of secondary importance.
The crass stigmatisation of economic migrants being bad people, so illegal, but refugees from war or famine being good people, is sheer stupidity.
Much, if not most long distance migration does appear to be for economic reasons.
In this context, Daryl Hall and John Oates inadvertently summed up a migration dynamic in a lyric for the love lorn:-
“The strong give up and move on, the weak give up and stay”
There is no doubt that you need money to migrate long distances, but personal resilience and determination in the face of adversity are also evident personal qualities.
Personally, I reckon anyone who arrives in the UK from a small boat after travelling across the Mediterranean, maybe from the Horn of Africa, ought to be given preferential treatment as an immigrant. Mo Farah is a classic.
Long term environmental degradation will become very widespread across the whole planet and this will also affect more temperate latitudes.
There is no escape from climate change impacts.
The SE of the UK is already in semi-permanent water deficit.
The massive globally important industrial agricultural flatlands like the steppes and prairies will suffer too . Their dependence on high chemical inputs and monocultures means they are more vulnerable to soil degradation, and hence falling yields, than conventionally farmed areas. Without soil fertility remediation measures these global breadbaskets will become much more vulnerable to shock events.
This includes our own eroding fens where soil blows and oxidation are having a progressive impact.
I agree short distance moves are almost always people’s preferences, until they are no longer possible.
‘As recently as the 1997 signing of the landmark Kyoto Protocol, two degrees Celsius of global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons we used to call “natural disasters” but will soon normalize as simply “bad weather.” More recently, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands offered another name for that level of warming: “genocide.”’
“The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future” David Wallace-Wells
All pretty simple really. We all just need to rediscover our own individual humanity
Migration is a collective problem.