Mass climate migration is coming
Unprecedented heat, drought, and wildfires have caused havoc and misery in the once mild British Isles this year as climate change has taken its toll beyond the mid-latitudes. Across the Channel, Europe’s once pleasant Mediterranean climate has been plagued by dangerous fires, smoke, heat, floods and, more recently, glacier collapse for several years. The United States, too, is constantly confronted with extreme events somewhere in the country – and often several at once. When fires get out of control, floods flood communities, hurricanes wipe out buildings, or smoke makes the air unbreathable, people are forced to leave their homes. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from the Gironde region of France in just one week in July, the same month that mass evacuations were announced in California and Kentucky. After every natural disaster, people return to recover and adapt, or permanently move to a safer place. In poorer countries, closer to the equator, the situation is much worse. Increasingly, people cannot return, cannot adapt. They must move. In 2023, this question will become impossible to ignore.
Climate change is exacerbating the massive migration already taking place in the cities of the world and is becoming a major problem worldwide. In 2022, the number of internally displaced people exceeded 100 million for the first time, with climate change displacing more people than conflict. Models show that for every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced. In the next decade, hundreds of millions of people will have to move – you will either be among them or you will accept them.
We are facing a huge upheaval, a crisis for our species. However, to date, little is known about this inevitable climate migration and certainly no plans are made to manage it. It has taken decades for governments to take any meaningful action to mitigate climate change by decarbonizing their economies. It has already begun, although too late to avoid a global rise in temperature. Essential process adaptation climate change — something that should happen everywhere, from the infrastructure we build to our food and energy systems — has barely begun and still attracts far less funding than mitigation. However, there is a big elephant in the international climate negotiating room that remains undiscussed: a growing number of people lack the ability to adapt; they will have to move.
A global map of today’s climate impacts, and modeled for the coming decades as temperatures continue to rise this century, makes clear that humans will have to move large swaths of the tropics, which will become uninhabitable for at least part of the year, off coastlines. when the sea level rises and the weather becomes more extreme, and from low-lying islands. Infrastructural arrangements will not save us, and agriculture will become impossible in places that are now the breadbaskets that provide for millions of people. Where will they move? Mainly to the north, towards the expanded cities and completely new cities that will need to be built on the livable fringes of Europe, Asia and North America. If managed properly, this migration can provide much-needed population growth in countries with labor shortages due to low birth rates, and can also help reduce poverty in some of the hardest-hit countries. If badly managed, it will be a catastrophic coup with huge loss of life.
The problem of climate migration is now relevant. It will be raised at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 28) to be held in the UAE in 2023. But it’s too important to leave it to the COP’s ice-cold discussions. In 2023, we will start a broader conversation about how we will respond to and manage this massive climate migration as an international community, including considering the creation of a global body that could oversee it.
We have failed to prevent climate change; we can still prevent its most catastrophic consequences.