To bring awareness to Refugee Week UK 2024, each day we will be sharing a blog post by MSc students on the Forced Displacement and Refugees course in the LSE Department of International Development. For a complete listing of Refugee Week events or to get involved, check out the Refugee Week website. You can also check out seasons 1 to 3 of the LSE ID ‘Refugee Realities’ podcast on Spotify and Apple music.
There is no such thing as a ‘climate refugee’. Environmental stress cannot be single-handedly labelled as a cause for migration, but rather its impact on migration must be explored alongside present socio-economic vulnerabilities, population movements, and identify the differences amongst environmental stressors. If the interconnection is understood as monocausal, we risk misinterpreting migration flows, leading to securitisation practices and misguided responses.
Environmental stresses have been increasingly acknowledged as one of the main factors in fostering migration. With climate change being expected to worsen and to produce gradually more destructive environmental stresses, the international community have hypothesised that migration flows will surge due to uninhabitable living conditions. Countries most at risk of climate disaster are those already facing internal crises, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, or Yemen, and where populations have little adaptive capacity to confront the growing challenges to their livelihoods. Alarmist discourses predict that up to 200 million displaced ‘climate refugees’ or ‘environmental migrants’ will flee their climate-vulnerable homes and seek the aid and benevolence of Western governments and humanitarian organisations for relocation, as these pose an attractive alternative through stable political and economic environments. These numbers, however, are unrealistic, and the term itself is problematic as it assumes that the interconnection between environmental stress and migration is mono-causal.
Risk factor
Migration is ‘intimately connected to the status associated with people concerned’. A person’s individual vulnerability and resilience to an environmental stressor, such as droughts, floods, or wildfires, largely derives from their ability to cope and adapt to it. Not every person is at the same identical risk, and their exposure and response to an environmental stressor is highly dependent on the intersectionality of their social identities, as well as their socio-economic background. For example, in Bangladesh, power resides with large landholders, who corruptly force the poor and illiterate majority to move out of their land into areas highly vulnerable to climate change stressors. Small and eroded land plots, combined with varying precipitation levels and increasing temperatures, exacerbate people’s dependency on landowners not only for land itself, but also wage labour. Landlords, however, promote economic activities which strengthen their economic interest, rather than that which ensures people’s livelihoods. Thus, power dynamics in Bangladesh, combined with environmental stressors, intersect and shape vulnerability and (im)mobility. Whilst landlords have the socio-economic capital needed to resist environmental stressors, poor and vulnerable rural workers are forced to move to both to address the lack of land and the deteriorating livelihood opportunities. Developmental responses must therefore not only mitigate the impact of environmental impacts themselves, but the vulnerabilities derived from social discrimination to target the complex dynamics which produce forced displacement.
Mobility as a part of everyday life
The term ‘migration’ does not appropriately account for the already present patterns of mobility within populations. Mobility can be temporary or permanent, short or long distance, depending on the reasons and impact of population movement. Mobility can be understood as a non-threatening adaptive capacity to vulnerability, derived from environmental stressors or socio-economic positions. ‘Climate mobilities’ therefore, build on present migration patterns, and present adaptive solutions non-threatening to host communities’ or countries’ ‘security’. Tuvalu is one of the many low-lying Pacific Island states facing an environmental led existential crisis due to rising sea levels. Currently, sea levels are rising by an average 5 millimetres a-year, and this rate is expected to more than double by 2100. Much of Tuvalu’s land will sit below average sea high tide by 2050. To address the problem, Australia and New Zealand have passed bilateral agreements with Tuvalu to relocate 280 and 75 people each year respectively from the island. Nevertheless, these agreements are built on the same discourses securitising migration, with Australia continuing to have one of the world’s harshest approaches to unregulated migration, detaining all ‘unlawful’ arrivals in horrendous conditions. These agreements thus serve to control future migration patterns and continue securitising Western borders.
Instead, mobilities should be interpreted and built upon Tuvaluan experiences of migration. Mobility forms parts of Tuvalu’s everyday life, with livelihoods reliant on transnational networks for studying and working abroad, as well as remittances. Seafaring, an important economic practice, relies on flexible movement, and highlights the interconnection of the Oceanic continent. Moreover, Tuvaluans themselves highlight that international efforts should move away from discussing how to deal with future ‘climate refugees’, and instead tackle the root cause of the problem: climate change. Mervina Paueli, a 25-year-old Tuvaluan, travelled to the COP28 in Dubai to stress the need for stronger international action against climate change. Contextualising migration practices allows to debunk alarmist discourses and allows for the voices of those affected by environmental stressors to voice their views on, not only the interconnected issues leading to displacement, but the responses that more adequately address their needs.
Identifying the environmental stressor
To draft appropriate responses which target forcibly displaced populations, environmental stressors cannot be generalised. Rapid on-set climate change-related disasters, such as floods or cyclones, tend to provoke internal and temporary mobility patterns, whilst slow on-set disasters, such as drought or sea-level rise, can create more long-term mobility where migrants aim to diversify their livelihood strategies. Discourses around ‘climate refugees’ mask the diversity of environmental stressors, and how these interplay with existing vulnerabilities and mobility flows in establishing experiences of migration. For example, Western governments pointed to environmental stressors as triggering a ‘climate war’ in Syria, threatening their own national security due to potential waves of ‘climate refugees’. These failed to highlight the difference in environmental stressors throughout Syria, instead generalising to region-wide precipitation levels. Protracted drought was understood as having repeatedly caused poor harvests, driving rural citizens to urban areas, and fuelling social unrest. However, the ‘climate war thesis’ disregarded long-standing poor Syrian governmental policies, which exacerbated the vulnerability of the poor and ethnic minorities to sub-regional droughts. Whilst drought might have triggered internal mobilities, conflict was derived from long-standing socio-political tensions. The ‘environment is political’, with monocausal narratives of environmental stressors and migration utilised by governments to securitise the issue and restrict international movement.
Environmental stress and migration are deeply interconnected but cannot be explained through a direct relationship which feeds western securitisation narratives and failed aid responses due to misinterpretation of the issues at hand. Instead, climate change must be understood as affecting individuals and communities which already face other vulnerabilities, such as poverty or social and economic insecurity. Future ‘climate mobilities’ will be built on already existing migration patterns and cannot be simply portrayed as something negative or destructive. Instead, it can present a resilient alternative to affected and vulnerable communities.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Featured image credit: President of Tuvalu’s COP26 address, from the World Meteorological Organization on Flickr.
