Environmental Migrant - Predictions and Attempts To Enumerate 'environmental Migrants/ Refugees'

Predictions and Attempts To Enumerate 'environmental Migrants/ Refugees'

There have been a number of attempts over the decades to enumerate 'environmental migrants/ refugees'. Jodi Jacobson (1988) is cited as the first researcher to enumerate the issue, stating that there were already up to 10 million ‘Environmental Refugees’. Drawing on ‘worst case scenarios’ about sea-level rise, she argued that all forms of ‘Environmental Refugees’ would be six times as numerous as political refugees. (1988: 38). By 1989, Mustafa Tolba, Executive Director of UNEP, was claiming that 'as many as 50 million people could become environmental refugees' if the world did not act to support sustainable development (Tolba 1989: 25). In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 1990: 20) declared that the greatest single consequence of climate change could be migration, ‘with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and severe drought’ (Warner & Laczko: 2008: 235). In the mid-1990s, British environmentalist, Norman Myers, became the most prominent proponent of this ‘maximalist’ school (Suhrke 1993). Noting, that "environmental refugees will soon become the largest group of involuntary refugees". Additionally, he stated that there were 25 million environmental refugees in the mid-1990s, further claiming that this figure could double by 2010, with an upper limit of 200 million by 2050 (Myers 1997). Myers argued that the causes of environmental displacement would include desertification, lack of water, salination of irrigated lands and the depletion of bio-diversity. He also hypothesised that displacement would amount to 30m in China, 30m in India, 15m in Bangladesh, 14m in Egypt, 10m in other delta areas and coastal zones, 1m in island states, and with otherwise agriculturally displaced people totalling 50m (Myers & Kent 1995) by 2050. More recently, Myers has suggested that the figure by 2050 might be as high as 250 million (Christian Aid 2007: 6).

These claims have gained significant currency, with the most common claims being that 150-200 million people will be climate change refugees by 2050. Variations of this claim have been made in influential reports on climate change by the IPCC (Brown 2008: 11) and the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Stern et al. 2006: 3), as well as by NGOs such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace Germany (Jakobeit and Methmann 2007) and Christian Aid; and inter-governmental organisations such as the Council of Europe, UNESCO, IOM (Brown 2008) and UNHCR.

Despite these attempts at enumeration, there is in fact a dearth of empirical evidence to support the concept of 'environmental migration’. Norman Myers is perhaps the most widely cited, and the authority of his claims is often attributed to the fact that his chief contribution to the field (Myers & Kent 1995) used over 1000 sources. However, on visiting his bibliography, it becomes apparent that of these sources, the vast majority constitute nothing more than a rather desultory overview of environmental science that has no obvious connection with discussions of societal impacts or migration. Indeed, only 121 sources have even a remote connection to the broad themes of migration, refugee or population displacement. Only 25 of these sources discuss the migration-environment linkage explicitly, and it is worth noting that this number is little different than any other paper on ‘Environmental migration’, and consists chiefly of isolated case study material. Vikram Kolmannskog has stated that Myers’ work can be ‘criticized for being inconsistent, impossible to check and failing to take proper account of opportunities to adapt’ (2008: 9). Furthermore, Myers himself has acknowledged that his figures are based upon ‘heroic extrapolation’ (Brown 2008: 12). More generally, Black has argued that there is ‘surprisingly little scientific evidence’ that indicates that the world is ‘filling-up with environmental refugees’ (1998: 23). Indeed, Francois Gemenne has stated that: 'When it comes to predictions, figures are usually based on the number of people living in regions at risk, and not on the number of people actually expected to migrate. Estimates do not account for adaptation strategies different levels of vulnerability' (Gemenne 2009: 159).