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Climate migration myths

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 901–903 (2019)Cite this article

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Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

International migration and climate policy assumes that anthropogenic climate change already is, and will increasingly be, a major driver of mass migration from the Global South to the Global North. The UNFCCC explicitly specifies the need to avert, minimize and address climate displacement1, while the UN Security Council warns of mass climate migration and the subsequent risk of aggravating conflicts2. Although the potential for climate change to disrupt livelihoods and threaten lives is real, these policies reinforce a false narrative that predicts large numbers of ‘climate refugees’. This self-referencing narrative in scientific literature and policy reports has the consequence of entrenching climate migration as a looming security crisis without an empirical scientific basis3.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research under grant no. VENI 451‐16‐030 and the Wageningen University Department of Social Sciences Excellence Fund.

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Affiliations

  1. Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Ingrid Boas, Simon Bush, Hanne Wiegel & Machiel Lamers

  2. Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

    Carol Farbotko

  3. Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK

    Helen Adams

  4. Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Harald Sterly & Patrick Sakdapolrak

  5. United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security, Bonn, Germany

    Kees van der Geest

  6. Department of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Hasan Ashraf

  7. Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Andrew Baldwin

  8. Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Giovanni Bettini

  9. Institute of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland

    Suzy Blondin & Etienne Piguet

  10. African Studies Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

    Mirjam de Bruijn

  11. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    David Durand-Delacre & Mike Hulme

  12. German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany

    Christiane Fröhlich

  13. School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Giovanna Gioli

  14. Sociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Lucia Guaita, Basundhara Tripathy Furlong & Jeroen Warner

  15. Hugo Observatory, Department of Geography, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Elodie Hut & Caroline Zickgraf

  16. Department of Planning, University for Development Studies, Wa, Ghana

    Francis X. Jarawura

  17. Centre for Sustainable Development Studies, Institute for Environmental Management and Land Use Planning, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Samuel Lietaer

  18. University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Institute of Forest, Environment and Natural Resource Policy, Wien, Austria

    Sarah L. Nash

  19. Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Delf Rothe

  20. Human Geography, Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

    Lothar Smith

  21. KTH, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, Stockholm, Sweden

    Ethemcan Turhan

  22. College of Social Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Richard Black

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  1. Ingrid Boas
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  16. Lucia Guaita
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  21. Sarah L. Nash
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  22. Etienne Piguet
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  23. Delf Rothe
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  24. Patrick Sakdapolrak
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  26. Basundhara Tripathy Furlong
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  29. Caroline Zickgraf
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  30. Richard Black
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  31. Mike Hulme
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ingrid Boas.

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Cite this article

Boas, I., Farbotko, C., Adams, H. et al. Climate migration myths. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 901–903 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0633-3

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