One Billion Climate Migrants? Not So Fast

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CHAPTERS 

[00:02:08]: Why the 1 billion climate migrants estimate is off base 

[00:03:11]: Assumptions about human mobility 

[00:07:55]: How organizations use data to plan for climate-related movement 

[00:09:34]: How large projections can shape public and policy debates 

[00:12:13]: What existing data shows about displacement — and its limits 

[00:14:49]: Internal displacement and gaps in legal protection 

[00:16:52]: Understanding climate stress and conflict  

[00:20:16]: Tanzania case study: farmers, herders, and the fight over disappearing land 

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.11]

Welcome back to Changing Climate, Changing Migration, a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that looks at migration and human movement in the face of climate change. Through this podcast and conversations with top experts in the field, we hope to get beyond the headlines and provide some nuanced analysis about an issue that's of growing interest, but which we're still learning a lot about. I'm Julian Hattem, the host of this podcast and the editor of MPI's online journal, the Migration Information Source. Today, I want to get a bit more specific about climate migration. In particular, I want to figure out how many people there are who might move in response to some of the effects of climate change in coming years. But it turns out that's not an easy question to answer. Depending on who you ask, you get a big range of numbers. One commonly cited figure, which I believe dates back to the late environmentalist Norman Myers and which gets thrown around a lot of, is that there will be 200 million climate migrants globally by the year 2050. But projections vary a lot. Some researchers have said that at the lower end, there could be just a few million people that we might call climate migrants over the next three decades.

[00:01:14.24] 

And on the higher end, the nonprofit group Christian Aid has estimated that there could be 1 billion people displaced by climate change by 2050. The think tank, the Institute for Economics and Peace recently released a report saying that there could be 1.2 million people, billion people who could be at risk of displacement. So there's a lot to wade through here and to help me make sense of this, my guest today is Julia Blocher. She is a researcher focusing on climate change and migration at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. She has an excellent TEDx talk on climate migration, and I'm very excited to talk to her. Julia, thank you so much for coming on.

[00:01:52.18] 

Hi, Julian. And thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:55.07] 

Well, you're very welcome. So you've been in this space for a while. You have surely seen all these numbers floating around. Which ones can we trust? Which of these is right?

[00:02:05.12] 

So it's a kind of short answer. I think that. I don't think really any of these numbers have a huge amount of merit in an academic, scientific sense. Of course. They are numbers that we see a lot in the news media because they are headline grabbing and they do have some good intentions behind them and some interesting things that we can learn from these. But overall, most of these numbers are difficult to take very seriously in policy planning or really understanding the reasons why people are moving in the Context of climate change. And I'm really happy to explain why. Of course, this is a very important question. 

[00:02:49.08] 

Why are there so many different predictions and why are they not very useful?

[00:02:53.00] 

Absolutely, they're all quite different, as you have noticed. So the first ones that came up, I think even as early as 1985, we were talking about 50 million people displaced in the context of climate change by the middle of this century. Really what I think we see here is the mismatch between natural sciences and human behavior. And what I mean by that is most of these reports and figures are really looking at making risk assessments using population projections. So looking into the future of numbers of people, especially in concentrating in certain parts of the world, and then looking at natural and physical processes like drought which will make it difficult to live in that area, or sea level rise and other climate related hazards. But what we know as migration scholars is that people don't wait around until sea level is around their waist. People migrate already before that and also have many, many other different reasons why they might choose to migrate that have nothing to do with climate related hazards. Really these numbers are very often referred to in my line of work as like back of the envelope estimations of people who are at risk of certain climate change impacts.

[00:04:22.17] 

But there's so much uncertainty involved there and really a sort of lack of human agency in these numbers that they're not very useful from a scientific perspective and also really are not very useful operationally for people and for, well, NGOs and governments that may have to deal in the future with people who are moving from natural hazard induced disasters or climate change impacts that are more gradual, like droughts, land degradation, et cetera.

[00:04:56.05] 

So is the calculation basically for a lot of these estimates that we know, X number of people live in low lying areas or areas that are at risk of hurricane whatever disaster, as those, as sea levels rise, as hurricanes come, they will have to move. Is it like basically that kind of simple calculus or how, how does the math work in a simplistic form?

[00:05:19.13] 

Right, that's basically exactly it, is that we look at the number of people that are living in climate prone areas and then project those populations into the future. But the reason why this type of risk assessment is not super helpful when we're talking about a social and behavioral phenomenon like migration, is that those impacts may or may not involve people moving in the future. People may move before they may choose not to move, even if they're in a risky area. That's something that we see a lot, especially in developing Countries where people simply can't afford to migrate and so they stay behind. But also these estimations are difficult in the sense that we already have a lot of uncertainty involved in climate projections and in population projections as well. The latest IPCC assessment report, also studying all the literature out there, suggested that we should have very low confidence in these projections of migration in the future because of the multicausal nature of migration as well as uncertainty inherent in the climate models that are being used. You have uncertainty in the climate models, you have uncertainty in which emissions pathway we will follow as a globe.

[00:06:43.01] 

Are we going to get to 2 degrees or 4, maybe even 5 degrees warming? This makes a huge difference in terms of actual impacts on, you know, local communities. And then we have the uncertainty of how people will perceive and react to the climate impacts around them on a very local level. So it doesn't really necessarily make sense to talk about global estimations of people who would be affected by climate change and may or may not move as a result. You know, vulnerability will look really very different in New York City where also their sea level rise is likely to have an impact as compared to agriculturalists in Sub-Saharan Africa whose livelihoods depend on rain fed agriculture.

[00:07:29.02] 

Yeah, so I've noticed that a lot of official quote unquote, like UN organizations, places like the International Organization for Migration, the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, refrain it seems like, from making some of these predictions. So what if you're in that organization, if you're in the of these big official bodies, what are you looking at then for future projections? I mean, how are you thinking about what the world will look like in 10, 20, 30 years?

[00:07:55.21] 

Yes, so this is something I think we have to grapple with a lot. In my line of work and for example, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, we're not completely shying away from this type of discussion. What we do and what I think groups in IOM and UNHCR probably prefer to do is look more at local impacts of climate change and how people are currently dealing with them and what type of coping strategies they are able to employ and may continue to employ in the future, which includes migration, and then try to think about how we can improve on resilience in these communities so that people are better able to deal with climate change impacts and may be better able to stay where they are if they so choose, or migrate in such a way that they can actually increase their resilience and household income sources, rather than using migration as a kind of last resort strategy. But I also think, and this is sort of another point, is that the UN agencies that are working with migrants and conventional refugees in the 1951 convention sense are a bit hesitant to play into this narrative about climate change leading to population movements.

[00:09:24.15] 

In part because even though these previous assessments may have been well intentioned and also helpful in terms of understanding risks of climate change, they tend to feed into anti immigration narratives rather than provoking climate action or climate change action. So this is something that a lot of people have been discussing recently that, you know, there's a bit of fear mongering going, going around and talking about hundreds of millions of people who may move in the context of climate change doesn't really help that, especially when the research that we have tells us that people are going to much more likely stay within their own home countries and not cross international borders. So the whole climate refugee debate is a bit misleading and can even be counterproductive.

[00:10:21.12] 

And it reframes, it seems like you're saying the conversation, at least from kind of a political level, from one focused on climate change to one focus on immigration, which have very different responses depending on where you are in the world. Is that fair?

[00:10:36.15] 

I think that's very fair. So I would, I think that what we try to do in, at the Potsdam Institute and other researchers is really try to provide an evidence base so that migration policy can be sensible, that climate change policy can be sensible. And I think that that requires an integration between natural sciences and social sciences. But it also really requires us understanding perceptions of people, localized impacts of climate change, and how people are already dealing with this, as well as specific vulnerabilities of different population groups and how organizations like IOM, UNHCR, other international NGOs can really help specific groups of people confront the challenges that they will face. Because climate change is not going to impact everyone in the same way.

[00:11:31.02] 

And so I want to be clear, a lot of these projections that we are talking about are mostly forward looking for the future. But what do we, I mean, we know these kinds of movements or that we're talking about are happening now, right? I mean, people are moving or changing their patterns of movement because of changes and impacts on the environment and climate, right? I mean, do we know how many people there are or if we want to refrain from numbers, where are they? What kind of people there are? I mean, what can you tell us about who these current populations are that are moving or changing their movements in response to some of the climate impacts today, tomorrow, yesterday?

[00:12:08.09] 

Yes. So this is when we get into a bit of a technical conversation, because we do know in a lot of countries how many people are displaced by disasters. So people who are fleeing their homes at a moment's notice because of an imminent threat, which in 2019, 95% of those hazards were weather related. So storms, cyclones, hurricanes and so on, this type of person in 2019 alone was 24.9 million people. So and that's just for 2019. Of course, you have to put a couple of footnotes on those numbers because we're not really able to say that that is directly related to the number of people. So we say 24.9 million. It may be that people were double counted if they were displaced more than once in the course of the year. Also there's a significant amount of inter year variability because these displacements are caused by large scale events. So if we look back to 2010, we would have seen a huge spike in the number of disaster displacements because of the hurricane, I mean, sorry, the earthquake in Haiti. Whereas, you know, in past years most displacement events have been related to weather events.

[00:13:34.07] 

So that is, that information is coming from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center that monitors the number of people displaced by disasters every year. But they also rely on information from governments which is not always systematically collected and not always and not really standard. So in some countries you consider people who become homeless as a result of a disaster as being displaced. In other countries you don't consider that the right definition. So it's again difficult to say for a global estimation on that when it comes to. Sorry, go ahead.

[00:14:15.16] 

No, sorry. That number is talking about displacement, which tends to be short term. Usually people will go back, as we've discussed. They won't always go back. And the compounding effort or the compounding impact of a lot of events might cause a more permanent migration. But displacement tends to be short term and probably just to somewhere else within the same country. Right. These aren't necessarily people who are. Hurricane comes and they say, okay, I'm moving to the country next door and living there for good. These tends to be short term movements or no.

[00:14:48.02] 

Our understanding is, is that it's a really small minority of people who cross an international border and most of the most people who are displaced in the context of a disaster will stay within their home country. The few that may cross, there is no current legal solution for them. They would not be considered a refugee under the 1951 Convention. It's an emerging area of international law, basically, and it's an interesting one. When we're looking at these displacements, though, we may consider that in the future they'd be more likely to cross borders. For example, if global warming impacts are so severe in the country that they have really nowhere within their own country to go, it can be a possibility. But the duration of the displacement is difficult to say because we very rarely have data on displacement over time. The longitudinal data is really lacking. But the internal displacement monitoring center again has done research on this and suggested that displacement may last longer than previously thought. People may remain living in displacement for years.

[00:16:08.18] 

Okay, and I want to briefly talk with you about some of the possible consequences of this movement or changing in movement or displacement. I mean, on its face, like all migration or all movement, it's neither necessarily good nor bad, but it can lead to different outcomes. And one of those outcomes that I know you've kind of looked into and that has risen in prominence in recent years is the possibility of conflict, particularly violent conflict, at least according to some research. Right. Researchers. Can you explain that to me? I mean, what do we know about how some of this movement in response to climate impacts may cause or impact violent conflict?

[00:16:46.07] 

Right. So as you mentioned, one thing I've been looking into recently is how climate change impacts add pressure to existing vulnerabilities and also to existing community fault lines. So climate change may in the... It may currently and also in the future add pressure to resource based competition, including competition between different types of land users. And this type of dispute may not necessarily become violent, but it can escalate into a localized flare up of conflict. Other ways in which climate change may affect conflict is, I mean, in a theoretical sense there could be interstate conflict. In the case that there's conflicting claims over cross boundary resources like in the Nile river area, these are very highly climate affected countries that are now trying to figure out how they can cooperate to have water resources.

[00:17:54.19] 

Another way to send off between like Ethiopia and Egypt right over this dam and kind of some of the water usage there.

[00:18:01.18] 

Right, exactly. So we could consider that in the future when as resources become increasingly scarce as a result of climate change impacts, this kind of diplomatic tensions may not be resolved as they were in the past and can escalate. But we also know that in previous or at least historically, cooperation over cross boundary resources has tend to lead to more positive diplomatic relationships between countries and actually reduce the likelihood of interstate conflicts. So if we consider natural resources that are shared across European countries, for example, and related to that, but it's kind of something that is more speculative than anything is what happens in the case that citizens believe that their government is not adequately addressing climate change or not adequately managing natural resources. This could potentially lead to civil unrest and escalate into civil conflict.

[00:19:12.08] 

And so anger at the government basically for not doing enough to deal with some of these hazards.

[00:19:17.08] 

Right, that's hypothetically possible. Right.

[00:19:21.14] 

So let's get a little bit more specific. I know you've done some work in Tanzania and as well as in the Pacific Island states elsewhere in East Africa. I mean, what have you seen on the ground, particularly about some of these conflicts that might emerge? I know you've done some of your work about Tanzania hasn't particularly focused on competing like land use issues. Right. Like farmers versus herders and kind of. Tell me about that.

[00:19:45.18] 

Yes, we are doing research in Tanzania at the moment about how local communities adapt to climate change, including through migration. And through that research, really we came across this issue of land based disputes between different communities, especially between farming communities and pastoralists, mobile pastoralists. So what I've been particularly interested in is in the case that pastoralists are moving more frequently and in longer distances and over longer periods of time as a result of scarcity of pasture and water resources. They become increasingly in contact with farming communities they may not have previous contact with and also with other pastoralist groups that they may not have, you know, historically been dealing with as often as they may be now. In Tanzania there is a kind of pluralistic land tenure situation in which land is owned by the government in a certain sense, but also allows there's local administration of land that allows for customary land tenure. So this unfortunately leads to misunderstandings in a lot of cases where the private land ownership may not coincide with the customary land ownership. And by that I mean simply that pastoralists are used to for generations going to the same areas for pasture and for water for the livestock.

[00:21:33.05] 

We have been looking in particular in a central area of Tanzania and also in the semi arid area in the northern regions and found a lot of evidence of farmer herd of conflicts, especially during drought years, which is interesting in itself. Are trying to understand better why these conflicts arise. What are the underlying historical tensions that may exist there that can flare up when resources become scarce and also what are the policy solutions that we can recommend to reduce the likelihood of conflict.

[00:22:15.15] 

And super briefly, I mean, what are those policy solutions, I mean, what kind of steps are there that governments or NGOs, whatever, could take to mitigate some of these potential conflicts? And are they being taken or is the work still at a pretty elementary basic stage at this point?

[00:22:33.24] 

Well, luckily, the government of Tanzania is highly aware of this situation and has been working on this for some years, especially since the early 2000s. There was a number of violent flare ups between farmer and herder groups in parts of the country. So I think the foundation of the issue is really about mismatch between private land ownership and customary land ownership. So the best way to solve that would be to bring these different groups together, work out some kind of mutually beneficial land use plan, and then ensure that people are faithfully implementing that plan. And this is what the local communities also told us, that they think that that would be the best way forward. The local governments, meaning the village level, have brought people together to discuss these problems and create village level land use plans usually and more successfully in consultation with village elders, religious leaders, other types of community leaders, and then really work to ensure that these are fair and that people are able to and willing to follow them through.

[00:23:58.11] 

This is super interesting. I have a whole number of questions I would like to ask, but I think we should probably leave it there in the interest of time. But we talked about some big issues and I really appreciated this conversation. Julia, thank you so much for coming on. This has been really fun.

[00:24:12.13] 

Thank you again.

[00:24:15.08] 

Julia Blocher is a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. She's also an associate member of the Hugo Observatory in Belgium and the president of the International Youth Federation. And she's the co author of a recent report called Homeland for GIZ, the German development agency, on the impacts of climate change and migration in island states. And she's worked on a range of other reviews and analyzes and reports and other publications that are worth mentioning. Part of the difficulty with some of these predictions is that climate migration is not a straightforward process. It's indirect, it's difficult to measure, and it will look different for different people in different places. The same is true with climate change, and nothing is a foregone conclusion. There are a lot of factors that can affect how changes in the environment impact people and what they do in response. Thank you for joining us today and stay tuned as we continue to explore the linkages between climate change and migration. Keep up to date with every episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts or by subscribing to the podcast service of your choice. And while you're there, please leave us a review.

[00:25:30.22] 

It helps a lot. We also invite you to dig deeper into our climate change work. You can find our special series of articles on climate migration, including an article that Julia wrote about her research at Tanzania at migrationpolicy.org/climate. This episode was made possible by Lisa Dixon and Kenia Guerrero, with special help from Michelle Mittelstadt and Sara Staedicke. Music is from Patrick Patrikios. I'm Julian Hattem. Thank you for listening.