A pair of posts published at WUWT recently highlight an emerging concept in the climate community that’s worth some serious consideration.
The first was a response to John Kerry’s World War Zero effort, which uses big names and a national security focus to create bipartisan support for climate action. At WUWT, ommenters baselessly questioned (attacked) both Kerry’s intelligence and his military service. Real classy stuff.
WW0 seems like a promising way to appeal to its target audience, but there is a growing examination of the use of militaristic or security-focused environmental advocacy. Ironically, one of the most recent developments in that area was the subject of another WUWT post that went up shortly before the Kerry announcement.
The post is mainly just a press release for a new comment piece in Nature Climate Change with the denier-enticing title “Climate Migration Myths.” The study, by a group of some 32 researchers, calls for “a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.”
The piece makes two main points: that the connection between climate change and migration is often vastly overstated or oversimplified, and that the focus on “securitization” should be replaced by a new research agenda and language that instead examines “climate mobility.”
We’re basically going to ignore the first point, as the comment is really focused on the latter. And really, it’s not much of a point at all. The authors acknowledge that climate plays a role in motivating migration, but that it’s exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to make a direct link between climate change and someone’s decision to uproot their life.
Despite it being featured in WUWT, the proposed research priorities are definitely worth taking seriously. As we’ve discussed before, the notion that climate change is causing an influx of immigrants is already being used to whip up eco-facist white nationalism, and although this comment does not address that issue explicitly, it does offer some potential paths towards solutions.
Most relocation in general, and that due to climate change in particular, happens within a country on a regular basis. Migration, then, isn’t actually the most accurate term--and it’s heavily loaded with political implications. Changing the language to climate mobility would put the concept “in more neutral (and therefore analytical) terms” that wouldn’t carry any negative baggage.
For example, someone moving a hundred miles inland because their home was submerged by sea level rise and someone moving from one continent to another because a drought devastated farmland and triggered a civil war are both climate mobile. But only one would be captured by climate migration work, which artificially limits our scope of understanding.
In addition to incorporating more indigenous communities into the research process and looking more broadly at all kinds of climate mobility instead of just cross-border migration, the authors also make a call to shift the focus from the places people are leaving to where they’re headed to, because “global migration policy is defined by the strict border policies of popular migration receiving areas.” And unfortunately, “these border policies are in turn shaped by an increasing fear of migrants among many citizens, such as in several European countries, the United States, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere.”
In response to that rising tide of xenophobia, and “to expand beyond the securitization of climate-related mobility,” we should be focusing on funding research into “how to overcome the profound fear of the other,” the authors argue. To do so, we need “new and further collaborations across social science research into belonging, the acceptance of difference and identity.”
People have always moved around, pursuing their dreams or escaping their nightmares, and the climate community should do a better job of normalizing and indeed even celebrating this fact. The problem with climate migrants isn’t that they’re hoping to rebuild their lives in America or Europe–it’s the fact that their homelands have been destroyed.
And though you won’t see them as line items in any budget, compassion, empathy, and love will be the most valuable part of any approach to climate action.
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