Climate Change and Human Mobility: The Challenges of Accurate Communication

By Bethany Tietjen

What is the best way to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis while also keeping in mind the difficulty of understanding its severity? I have been thinking about this question a lot recently. As a new PhD student hoping to focus my dissertation on the impact of climate change on displacement and migration, I have been doing a lot of reading on the bleak predictions surrounding climate migrants. We see articles about people on the move, the ‘floods’ of refugees that are coming to our borders, and the extreme weather events that are pushing people to leave their homes. Some of these are real problems. Some of these are good storylines that sell newspapers. How to distinguish between the two? For academics and social scientists, the key is to rely on data. The data might not bring in the most views on a Washington Post article, but we can’t abandon it for the sake of a headline. The language we use to discuss global events shapes the way that people view them. This makes it crucial to use thoughtful language when writing about climate migration and displacement

I am finding myself in the midst of a dilemma – I appreciate the fact that climate induced migration is garnering mainstream attention, but I worry about the effects of relying on apocalyptic narratives surrounding climate migrants and what that might mean for policy responses. While throwing around UN estimates of “1 billion climate migrants on the move by 2050” makes for a good story (the original source of this estimate has since been removed from UN publications, though it is still frequently cited), it is actually very difficult to predict how many people will move due to climate change and where they will go. Many scholars write on the danger of relying too heavily on projections. But on the flip side, when we need to prepare for the future, what tools do we have but to model what it might look like?

I do not want to become the academic in my ivory tower ignoring a problem until I have the data that concretely proves it, but I also don’t want to charge full-steam ahead to report on a crisis that may not happen. Climate change is certainly happening, but is climate migration? The challenge of talking about climate migration lies in the fact that people move for a number of reasons, rarely just one. Will the effects of climate change be a part of that package of push factors? Absolutely. But can we name every migrant who moves because of a bad harvest a climate migrant? Probably not.

Image source: Overseas Development Institute

Part of the danger of using labels like climate refugees and climate migrants lies in the fact that they ignore the other significant factors that cause people to move. While an extreme weather event can be a final push causing a family to migrate, we must also consider the other factors that contributed to this decision as well as the factors that cause people to stay. In a city with strong infrastructure and social services, citizens might be far less likely to migrate after a hurricane. In a town that grows a diverse array of crops, a single bad harvest may not be enough to cause people to migrate. Thinking about the complexity of these decisions reminds us that labeling someone a climate migrant may be overly simplistic.

Another danger of using these terms and the apocalyptic narratives that often surround them is that they can lead to increasingly militarized policy responses. When a policymaker hears that millions of climate migrants will be knocking on their doors in the coming years, they might decide that a highly securitized border is the best response. In a world that is already struggling to provide services to millions of migrants, these types of reactionary responses can be extremely damaging.

So, as a student who hopes to study climate migration but doesn’t know how to properly talk about it, I am trying to challenge myself to approach the topic carefully. I want people to care about the ways that climate change will influence global migration, but I don’t want to instill fear that results in aggressive policy responses. What I do hope for is this: to read articles on climate change and human mobility that are grounded in data about things that have happened and how people responded to them; to shape policies that are based in reality and not projections and apocalyptic narratives. Hopefully these conversations can remain mainstream, even without scare tactics and clickbait.

Bethany Tietjen is a Junior Research Fellow focusing on climate migration at the Climate Policy Lab.