Climate migration as a security issue

Lorraine Elliott in Eurasia Review: The proposition that climate change will or could generate international security concerns has become prominent in public discourse over the last few years. Governments, international organisations and NGOs have increasingly directed their attention to climate change as a likely source of conflict. Climate change is most likely to be presented as a threat multiplier, overstretching societies’ adaptive capacities and creating or exacerbating political instability and violence. This is an updated version of predictions from the late 1980s and early 1990s that environmental degradation could contribute to various kinds of instability including civil disruption and perhaps even outright violence.

The United Nations has estimated that there could be ‘millions’ of environmental migrants by 2020. Various think tanks, government agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have produced reports that argue that migration can be a major risk factor in the chain of effects that link climate change and violent conflict. The expectation is that climate migration will result in tensions between those displaced within their own country and the communities into which they move, as well as between so-called climate ‘refugees’ (who cross an international border) and the states that receive them.

Various triggers for conflict have been identified — competition for scarce resources or economic support (or jobs); increased demands on social infrastructure; and cultural differences based on ethnicity or nationality. All of this is thought more likely in countries or regions that already suffer from other forms of social instability and that possess limited social and economic capacity to adapt.

Climate change-related migration is most likely to be a slow process. The language in the climate security and climate migration literature, on the other hand, conjures up the image of climate change-induced migration that is likely to be out of control and therefore highly threatening. The implication is that countries in the developed ‘North’ will somehow be threatened directly by the alleged ‘influx’ of climate refugees (the term itself is nevertheless contentious) or indirectly by instabilities that might arises in regions of strategic interest…

Palestinian refugees in 1948 fleeing the Nakba, shot by Fred Csasznik. Wikimedia Commons