Will there be climate migrants en masse?

• Author: Tanner, Arno
• Position: Report

While some countries are historically responsible for climate change, should the global community take up responsibility for climate migrants, even if they do not cross international borders? Should there be immigration concessions for climate migrants when they need to or have to cross borders? These are important questions that arise at a time of global climate change.

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It is important to first carefully ponder the character and probability of "climate migration" before we learn to cope with it. Is climate migration a new phenomenon? How large could it become? And most important, will climate events cause "en masse" local or regional migration?

Climate factors often cause local and global migration independently of the nature and severity of global climate change. In developing countries, drought has rendered large land masses non-arable or essentially unproductive, forcing people to move to cities where jobs are ever scarcer and food increasingly expensive. Emigration out of the country is then seen as the only viable solution. In this way, local climate problems have led to international migration.

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Nevertheless, existing moderate climate-bound migration may be exaggerated and the severity and certainty of it, too soon to predict. It is too early to say with certainty that there will be massive consequences of global warming, for example, the oceans wiping out the small-island States and other lowlands. It is also premature to argue that this will result in unprecedented mass migrations.

The factors limiting mass migration have to do with the scope of global warming, as well as with the probability and manner of intercontinental mass emigration in a life-threatening situation.

It is improbable that there would be long-distance mass population movements even in a situation of systemic climate change. As seen today refugee camps and shelter villages are typically set up not far from the site of the calamity.

We can look for an analogy in the number of current wars and levels of human rights violations, compared with the number of refugees and migrants actually fleeing those situations. Comparing the quantity of asylum applicants to the number of people threatened by the twenty or more wars currently being waged in the world, we see that the number of victims is many times that of those who actually flee long distances. While current wars severely disrupt the lives of tens of millions of people...