Climate change and movement of people

Coronavirus; energy prices; war in Ukraine; cost of living – events of the past few years have been tumultuous. In the context of recent crises, and with a resurgent populist far right in many parts of the world, it is hardly surprising many global leaders have prioritised security. But while doing so, many have also chosen to deprioritise climate action, as Rishi Sunak did with his slowdown of the UK’s net-zero plans in 2022.

However, a short-term and reactionary approach to managing issues like economic downturns endangers the goals which politicians claim to pursue. Here in the UK, for instance, evidence suggests green energy policies would have saved up to £1,900 in household energy bills in 2023, even as culture war politics led Sunak to claim they were exacerbating Britain’s cost of living crisis. And with ECIU research showing natural disasters elsewhere already contribute to rising food prices and shortages at home, tackling climate change everywhere is clearly in our own national interest too. In the absence of Britain becoming magically isolated from the Earth’s climate, instability overseas has consequences for our economy and stability at home.

Climate impacts are worsening with each additional fraction of a degree of warming, LSE analysis shows the cost of climate damages could reach 7.4% of UK GDP by 2100, mostly due to ‘catastrophic disruption’ of the global economy. In sharp contrast, achieving net-zero in 2050 would bring a net-benefit worth 4% of GDP, and help prevent the worst climate impacts. Already, net zero industries bring £74 billion in value to the UK economy each year.

The scale of economic disruption implied by that loss of GDP has societal implications, and is why the United Nations characterise climate change as a threat multiplier. Climate change already plays a role in destabilising poorer, developing societies in the Global South. This instability isn’t linear but operates in cycles as various social issues feed into each other in a process accelerated by climate change. In Mali, for example, the intensification of storms is degrading harvests, which exacerbates an existing cycle of resource shortage, conflict and displacement.

Climate change is not usually the direct or sole cause of conflict, but there is considerable evidence that its effects exacerbated and intensified the Arab Spring or conflict in the Sahel. In 2011, the movement of rural people into cities, impoverished by drought in the Middle East, coincided with the spike of global wheat prices due to drought in China. This fuelled the urban unrest behind the Arab Spring which, In turn, expanded conflicts in the Sahel.

At more than 1.2°C of warming already, a ‘concentration of crisis’ means the world’s most climate-vulnerable states are experiencing growing violence and extreme poverty. Whereas 44% of conflicts happened in climate-vulnerable states three decades ago, it is now more than two thirds.

On hearing the words ‘climate change’ and ‘migration’ together, you may well picture someone directly fleeing from natural disaster. But even as climate-fuelled extremes worsen, this is actually relatively uncommon. Rather, climate change tends to drive migration indirectly, through its long-term impacts on the stability of economies and societies. Some people will flee from a flood in the immediate aftermath, as we saw in Pakistan in 2022. But others might leave months or years afterwards, because they never recovered a stable income once the water destroyed their crops, livestock, home or business premises.

Discussion of migration in Britain has centred almost entirely on small boat crossings in the English Channel. However, not only do people seeking the UK’s protection account for just 12-13% of net-migration to the country, but those claiming asylum after crossing in small boats are only a third of those people – just over 27,000 in 2023. In fact, long-distance international migration represents the overwhelming minority of migration.

UNHCR reports that 58% of displaced people remained in their country of origin in 2023. Rural-urban migration is the leading driver of migration worldwide – a trend that has been underway for centuries. Yet if movement occurs too quickly, as the result of a disaster or drought for example, then urban population growth occurring too sharply, particularly in poorer regions, can fuel violence, unrest, shortages, the spread of disease, and the growth of slums.

More than two thirds (69%) of displaced people who did cross borders in 2023 then remained in a neighbouring country. This means only 13% of displaced people globally travel further than a country in the same region as their place of origin.

This is a far cry from the rhetoric of far-right parties in Europe and North America, portraying mass migration across the world as the cause of all ills. In 2023, only six of the top twenty countries hosting refugees and asylum seekers were in the west. Even on that list, the UK ranked eighteenth out of twenty.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports on those numbers of people forced to flee their homes each year, becoming displaced within their country of residence. In 2023, more than half (56%) of 46.9m new internal displacements were driven by disaster – 26.4m people, three quarters of whom fled homes after weather-related disasters such as storms, floods and droughts. At the end of last year, the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, reported over 117m forcibly displaced people around the world in total.

With the IPCC reporting up to 3.6 billion people living in areas highly vulnerable to climate impacts, and more than one billion exposed to just coastal climate hazards by 2050, the World Bank’s Groundswell Report reckons 216m people could find themselves forced by climate impacts to move within their countries by 2050 – some ten times the number in 2023.

No-one wants to be forced to leave their homes, family and friends; long journeys are difficult, dangerous and can be expensive. Any movement is not undertaken lightly. But as we continue to emit greenhouse gases and climate change continues to disrupt weather and drive more dangerous extremes, more people are left with little choice.

Research from MIT suggests that under a worst-case scenario of failing to reduce emissions, with climate feedback effects accelerating warming, parts of the Middle East, South Asia and China risk becoming uninhabitable by 2100, due to humid-hot conditions unprecedented in human history. Every thirty years, these areas could see conditions in which the human body could no longer cool itself by sweating, meaning even a healthy person would die within hours outdoors. To get to such a point, the everyday climate would be extreme enough to challenge people’s ability to work, or pursue normal levels of physical activity, as well as making it almost impossible to grow food. At such a point, movement becomes the only option.

Displacing large numbers of people from rural to urban areas within already poor and climate-stressed countries and regions, threatens national and regional stability.

A focus by media and the far right on one small aspect of migration sensationalises it and risks obscuring the human misery involved, the geopolitical instability it is in our interest to avoid, and the solutions which genuinely already exist to avoid worsening climate impacts.

Take Jeremy Clarkson writing about Storm Daniel which, in 2023, caused the collapse of two dams in the city of Derna, in Libya, leaving 14,000 people dead or missing and 40,000 more homeless. Clarkson linked the flood to migration to Europe. But while he declares the futility of “turning them all back”, he fails to mention Derna's dams were not maintained since 2002, nor that cracks were spotted as early as 1998, nor that many deaths could have been avoided had Libya had an early warning service. Such disaster was not inevitable.

Displacement of people occurs for a reason. With investment and support from wealthier countries, communities like Derna can adapt to a changing climate. And with urgent climate action, we can avert natural disasters such as Mediterranean storms becoming ever more intense into the future. The title of Clarkson’s article, “forget economic migrants; now it’s climate migrants”, simplifies and misrepresents a complex issue for clicks.

The danger – apart, obviously, from the dehumanising nature of so much of the ‘debate’ around migration – is that we distort the issues and solutions. Policies which protect human dignity and geopolitical stability are policies which address the forced displacement of people at their root cause. And solutions to climate mitigation and adaptation are amongst the tools we have to focus on both. Climate breakdown is not inevitable, and nor are the dangerous and destabilising results of ever worsening climate impacts.

In the modern world, economic and political stability are global issues, just as food security is. Solutions to climate change – and therefore to economic and political instability – stand to benefit us all.

Stopping burning fossil fuels, protecting and restoring nature, and getting to net zero emissions globally by mid-century are the solutions to halting warming and limiting further impacts. Not only is the IPCC clear we have the solutions to halve emissions this decade, and get on track for net-zero; it’s clear that investing in a better future now is cheaper than the ever-growing cost of unchecked climate change. Net zero yields cheaper energy, less global price volatility, cleaner air and a stronger economy.

But we also need to adapt to the impacts we already see at 1.2°C+ of global heating – which brings us to international climate finance, on which developed and developing countries will seek to negotiate an agreement at the COP29 climate conference in November.

Under the Paris Agreement, the wealthiest countries are committed to financing adaptation efforts and emissions reductions in poorer nations, given that the countries most vulnerable to climate impacts have contributed to global emissions the least. For example, African countries are on average losing 2-5% of their GDP due to climate-related hazards, and many are spending up to 9% of government budgets to respond. The costs to these countries will only grow, squeezing their capacity to finance core public services, never mind their own green energy transition. As a continent, Africa has contributed less than 3% of historical emissions; the UK, with a population twenty times smaller, has contributed 5%. And given the UK’s wealth, as one of the biggest economies on the planet, our capacity to invest is among the strongest in the world.

But even without moral arguments, climate finance benefits both the recipients, and a country like Britain. If we want a stable future economy, and secure food supplies in a less unstable world, we need to limit global temperature rises and adapt to the ones already locked in. Leading and aiding the global transition is a moral decision, but it’s also the decision which best ensures Britain’s national security, and the wellbeing and security of people worldwide.