Exaggerated predictions for future flows of people have long formed the core of the anti-immigration playbook. When you add the impacts of climate change to the equation, the numbers skyrocket.
Experts agree there is a relationship between climate change and human mobility. As early as 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s principal scientific body on climate change, deemed mass migration a key risk associated with rising global temperatures. Since then, scientists have amassed an impressive amount of diverse data and complex knowledge on how impacts of climate change, from sea-level rise to drought and desertification, can affect the ways people move. Yet, above all else, people want headline numbers. The future scale of displacement is seen to give weight to the issue. Predictions of how many people will be displaced in the future by climate change are what continually gain traction in the media, and, therefore, grab public attention. Over the past three decades, several reports have offered up predictions for how many people will be forced to move, typically delivering a figure in the hundreds of millions. More often than not – and much to the chagrin of experts on the topic – the predictions are little more than guesstimates motivated by the goal of shocking people into climate action. Scientific rigour takes a back seat.
Those of us who have made careers in the academic nuance of climate change and human mobility tend to work hard not to auction our expertise to media outlets desperate to peddle people who move as a homogenous bloc to be feared. And yet our careers tend to be punctuated by the frustration foisted on us by these high profile reports – often from well meaning environmentalists – being picked up by the press, and transformed into yet more scare stories about ‘immigrants’ to the West.
