Act now to stop a flood of climate refugees
The Earth is heating up and wildlife is on the move to higher, cooler ground.
Deer, rabbits and beavers are moving into the Arctic.
Butterflies once common in Mexico are now more likely to be spotted in Canada.
And human beings are shifting, too. Climate migration en masse is the big bogeyman that will keep border security at the top of the agenda for decades, and not just for hard-right alarmists. It’s already happening, of course. A breakdown of the nationality of small boat refugees this year shows Afghans, Eritreans, Iranians, Syrians and Sudanese topping the list. All have their political fears, all want to better their lives but most also form the advance guard of the great climate exodus.
The Afghans are fleeing the Taliban of course but also the sizzling weather that is causing severe drought and flash floods, that has displaced tens of thousands, destroyed houses, increased mortality. They are on the run not just from Taliban repression but also Taliban incompetence in dealing with a national emergency.
In the cross-Channel boats there are also technical experts, losers in Kabul’s war between religion and science; their flight, part of the
Afghan brain drain, makes it that much more difficult for the country to link up with international climate funding. Something similar goes for the Iranians on the move, many of them depressed by Iran’s so-called water mafia, linking the energy ministry, officers in the Revolutionary Guard and corrupt contractors. It’s a cabal that calls the shots on dam construction and maintenance and which perpetuates decades of mismanagement and water shortage.
Those escaping Iran don’t blame the drought and desertification for the exploding food prices but the rottenness of the regime itself.
Climate change and extreme weather are intertwined with war,radicalisation and the quest for safety, in driving populations to leave homes. The Institute for Economics and Peace calculates that by 2050, there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees, but that is not much more than informed guesswork, based on an assessment of the poor societal resilience of countries assumed to be the most exposed to extreme weather development.
Slow onset climate change gives time for human intervention
Some research suggests that climate change is a clear “threat magnifier”, and that there’s a heataggression relationship: a 10 to 20 per cent increase in the risk of armed conflict with each long-term rise of 0.5C. That too seems to be little more than a hunch. There are still too many gaps in the data. It is plain though that sea levels are rising, that it is hotter and sometimes torrentially wetter. What we don’t quite know is the relationship between desertification in the Sahel, for example, and the displacement of the young and their recruitment potential for terror groups. Will a failure to take in young male climate refugees end up swelling the ranks of sub-Saharan jihadists? We don’t know whether water scarcity conflicts over the Nile basin between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia have the potential for a spreading war that touches us all. Diplomacy has to become more concerned with cross-border resource management, particularly at a time when foreign aid budgets are being pared back.
Just as migration has push and pull factors, so climate change expresses itself both as a sudden onset disaster, such as flash flooding, and as a slow onset event like desertification (often aggravated by humans cutting down shrubs and trees or the state’s failure to manage water and land). Slow onset climate change gives time for human intervention, the building of dykes and the creation of new jobs.
It’s a typical feature of flood zones that inhabitants read the early signs of rising water and move upland. But this was rarely migration — it was a temporary displacement, the recognition by people on the move that they had settled on the floodplains because they were the most fertile and a belief that their community would survive when the waters receded. But if climate changes become more dramatic that return won’t be possible. These are not people clamouring to “invade”
Europe. Western migration policy is supposed to deter economic chancers but it won’t work, as presently conceived, against those fleeing the climate emergency.
Rather, foreign aid should be restored and more carefully targeted to ease adaptation to a world that looks set to be increasingly underwater. Australia has made a remarkable offer to the people of the Tuvalu whose islands may, if the forecasts hold, soon disappear. The plan is to take the 11,000 inhabitants, a few hundred per year, and resettle them in Australia. That’s the thing about migrants who have just lost their island: you can’t send them back home.
But of course 11,000 is a mere fraction of those who have crossed the Channel. Future policy will ultimately boil down to the numbers. At the moment the foreign secretary David Lammy’s promise to send a team of immigration experts to west Africa to spot forged entry visas seems woefully underpowered. A global population boom is predicted for the 2060s. If there is a simultaneous northward trek from the sub-Saharan states then European harbours and airports would be overwhelmed.
The Syrian migration of 2015, a million-strong escape from war and the Assad dictatorship — turned European politics upside down. Now something much bigger seems to be around the corner and we can’t even agree on whether there is such a thing as climate refugees, how they can be best helped and how society, theirs and ours, should prepare for the upheaval.
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