"Pollution - Guatemala City." Credit: Doron Derek Laor/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time.” These words spoken at the UN Security Council in 2011 by Antonio Guterres, then the head of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and now incoming UN Secretary-General, highlight the significance that climate change has acquired in global debates surrounding mobility of populations. Such statements are becoming increasingly mainstream in the highest echelons of global politics, with many echoing Gutteres' link between climate change and people on the move. This connection is referred to in a diverse range of sources. It appears in international NGO reports trying to attract attention to the sheer scale of the crisis. However, it can be found just as often in the security-focused narratives of global security think tanks. The latest reiteration of this link was in the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants agreed upon by the UN General Assembly in September 2016, which included a reference to “the adverse effects of climate change” as a potential driver of human mobility.
In such statements there is an emphasis on the direct and/or causal link between climate change and mobile people or the challenges of governing mobility in an age of climate change. However, the purpose of these statements is frequently opaque. Do they serve as a warning against possible dystopian futures of uncontrollable global migration (however inaccurately perceived as being inevitably towards the global north); as motivations to prevent the worst effects of climate change; as a call for ever-increasing border controls; or, in a more progressive tone, calls for global (climate) justice and a reconsideration of how people on the move are understood, portrayed and treated?
