The new book out by Giai Vonce gives us a convincing glimpse into the certain future of mass migration as a consequence of climate change. Through the analysis, we get to see human migration as one of the effective solutions to the damaging effects of global climate change.
The scale of the migratory patterns to come due to climate change will be massive and unprecedented. The claim of this is substantiated well with notes from UN reports and up-to-date demographic research. The specific climate impacts for various regions across the world range widely and the various drivers for putting people on the move include water shortages, resource conflicts and effects of heat waves on available arable land.
The author says “over the coming decades with face multiple crisis, including heat, fires, floods, and sea level rise, extreme weather and demographics shifts in our growing populations.”
This will have impacts all over the world and especially in Canada.
It is interesting to recall the manner that migration is usually framed in organized study and current journalism. We hear a lot about migrates, walls, horribly small boats in the Mediterranean. There are stories on refugee camps, refugees from wars, humanitarian disaster south of the Rio Grande. These are all chronicles of masses of people coming from the south with doubted claims of legitimacy… even the term “economic migrants” gets used to de-legitimize their presence. This all happens a million times over. One person cam be a legitimate refugee and another, from the same town, can be an “economic migrant” that isn’t deserving of quite the same due process.
Of course, the real story is going to increasingly be, people work land that gets dryer and dryer (or wetter and wetter) due to climate change and they need to move and then they become “economic migrants”.
In Canadian policy world and even in journalism, there is some struggle in the framing of immigration. Immigration is popular in Canada. But there’s a good amount of hand wringing about the “right numbers”, attaching it to housing issues, noticing that people cross at “unique… informal crossings…. And the quiet acceptance /negligence regarding migrant labourers. A different framing can help us move the conversation.
RE-FRAMING MIGRATION
The author tells us that the one thing these things all see to miss is framing of migration as a solution. She gives references to IPCC and IEA research and notes how there is so much more to explore and understand and anticipate when it comes to migration – climate migration in the coming years.
For her part, Giai takes us to some of the well documented stuff about impacts of global heating and ocean rise on human populations. There is good detail on the science findings on impacts for coastal communities, the impacts of drought and heat waves and floods on vulnerable populations. This leaves us seeing that there are significant sections of the world that will be difficult to live in. The most effective solution is migration. Mass migration.
The global community will be hit by fire, heat, floods and drought. And the impacts will NOT be distributed fairly. All the available research shows that parts of the world that contributed least to GHGs will often be hit hardest and will have the least robust infrastructure to manage it. In the coming decades it certainly clear that millions of people will be exposed to those impacts. That science has been available for some time.
This will result in huge migrations; not to overstate it but the number are unprecedented in history. This includes internal migrations within countries away from lowlands near the ocean to higher altitude or further north. Examples are close at hand. In America, people will (continue) to move away from New Orleans and then Miami to farther north and farther inland. There will be impacts for the American Southwest as water supply gets more uncertain year over year.
The migration – huge- will also inevitably be international. Populations from the south will need to move to northern locations with stable governments. Families in Bangladesh and Nigeria will move away from the coastlines to further inland. Global south to global north. This trend will play over and over again.
There are many positive sides to all this. This will potentially help some parts of the world that would otherwise be dealing with the economic calamity of population decline. Although immigration is not yet politically popular, Russia’s and Japan’s populations will certainly shrink without immigration. Canada’s and other OECD countries are not far behind on that dangerous demographic phenomenon.
The author goes out of her way to mention Canada in this regard. Canada is, luckily, one of the places in the world that has an overall political consensus favouring immigration and has formal plans to welcome immigrants in large numbers through the next decades. There will be pressures to increase the planned numbers no doubt. The author shows us that the scale of migration will be much more than current policy makers understand.
PRACTICAL INSIGHTS
The author falls short, however, on discussing the practical implications and policy mechanisms that will be needed to support the migrations. That is regrettable because this is an area where policy makers struggle around the world and here in Canada. So many OECD, EU and G20 neighbours invested in walls, detention centres, barriers, coast guards, to content with “law breaking” migrants, along with the associated corruption and human trafficking.
The context of practical implications doesn’t end at the borders. There are terrible records the world over for poor integration, discrimination and isolation for the thousands that make it through borders. The apparatus set up for economic integration of immigrants will certainly founder under the weight of reality when the numbers turn from hundreds, to thousands, and then millions in the coming decades. Around the world, jurisdictions will contend with education and social services access, discriminatory hiring, work visa programs. In Canada, too, the long-awaited resolutions for fair wages for foreign farm labour as well as recognition international certifications and education.
The book could have spent much more time on policy and program mechanisms that could functionally be put in place to make migration work better as a climate solution. Instead we are left with 1) migration being a great solution (which it is) and then 2) it will not work very well in most places because things aren’t set up to accommodate successful migrations.
There’s an earnest request for looser border restrictions to accommodate these inevitable migrations. This is well placed and even likely for places like Canada. Across the world, one should be less hopeful. We can reflect for a minute on that likelihood that xenophobia suddenly goes in retreat just on time for masses of people to enter places like EU , Russia, Japan. She doesn’t tell us how to loosen boarder restrictions. She doesn’t hold up some countries or regions as models. She doesn’t point to specific integration programs that help the migration process.
THERE ARE NO WINNERS
There are a couple of areas where the book falls quite short. The author goes a bit too far on the point about the rich North countries doing “relatively well” with climate change because they would grow more crops and may have some improved water sources for a time. Many northern locations will have alternative land areas for coping with changing weather and growing conditions. She also overstates the advantages there may be for shipping or other industries. This is a poor part of the analysis and these points don’t have the same research basis as some of the other discussions in the work.
There may have been some point to make in there that the rich countries in the world will have more options. To be clear, the literature on this from IPCC and EAI show that the impacts will be uneven, for sure, AND the impacts will be felt everywhere; there are only relative differences in degrees. The impacts are all negative.
The other area of analysis that is disappointing is when the author resorts to describing some of the harebrained geoengineering schemes for mitigating climate change. There could have been more critique of these desperate planet-sized schemes will lead to our doom. The author, instead, spends a whole section of the book telling how putting silicon in the sky would reflect the suns rays away. Nope – not a valid idea!! And for this part, there are no good footnotes, citations like she used in prior sections. She’s better when she’s fact-based and science based.
Luckily the conclusion takes us back to the research based realizations that climate change is upon us and we have to collectively face the reality of mass migration in the coming decades AND that we have to get good at seeing this as a solution.
The book does us all a huge favour by getting us to frame migration as the positive climate change solution that it is.
I hope this line of inquiry continues so it can assist with bringing alternatives and examples forward that help decision makers to address some of the real challenges for the necessary and inevitable reality of mass migration due to climate change.
