Counting climate migrants
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What question is More or Less asking about climate migration?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, the programme which makes sense of numbers in the news and in life. I'm Tim Harford. This week we take a look at what problems climate migration might pose.
So if we get climate change wrong, there is a very real danger we shall see levels of mass migration as yet unparalleled.
That's Chris Bryant, Britain's shadow immigration minister, warning that millions of people around the world will be forced to flee their homes and in their droves move to countries less affected by environmental problems. Now, some of this has already happened.
The United Nations estimates that in 2008 20 million people were displaced by climate change compared to 4.6 million by virtue of internal conflict or violence. But much more is to come. You can imagine that the UN estimates of 200 million such refugees, more than the total number of worldwide migrants today, may be about right.
Now, in fairness to Mr Bryant, he didn't just make that claim up. It did indeed come from the United Nations. But we still suspect that some kind of retraction may be necessary, alas. Here at More or Less, we have a climate migration correspondent, Hannah Barnes. Hannah, you've done this before. You specialise in taking the heat out of these kinds of statistics.
That's right. But it's not just me. Various experts in the field and even concerned charities have to spend a lot of their time correcting overblown statements like these.
Let's start with the claim that 20 million people were displaced by climate change in 2008.
And a surprising critic of that number, Alex Randall works for the Climate Outreach and Information Network, a charity which aims to raise awareness of climate refugees and their needs. So you might think he'd be shouting the same alarming numbers from the rooftops, but he's not.
What Chris Bryant was quoting in his speech was a kind of adding up all of the people who've been displaced by any kind of natural disaster. and labelling them climate refugees. And that's problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, because the relationship between natural disasters and climate change is complicated. It's certainly true that climate change might be making some of those particular disasters more likely, but it's certainly not the case that we can attribute all of those individual displacements to climate change alone.
And even if all 20 million people had been displaced by climate change, they're unlikely to be looking to set up home in a new country.
The idea that in the event of a natural disaster, people will immediately move long distances and permanently is mistaken. People tend to move short distances longer. for a short period of time and then move back.
Which high-profile claims say millions will be forced to move because of climate change?
So let's take a look at this claim from the United Nations, quoted by Chris Bryant, that 200 million people will become climate refugees in future.
Yeah, and what we're really talking about here is people who have to leave their homes because their lives and livelihoods are being adversely affected by climate change. So not just because of sudden natural disasters, but because of a slow creep, changing weather systems, say, or rising sea levels. But many experts don't expect this to cause mass migration. Alex Randall explains why.
If it becomes increasingly difficult for a farming community to sustain their livelihood by growing the crops that they have been, what's likely to happen is that in response to that, rather than all of them at once upping sticks and moving to another country, the likely response is that one or two household members will move. probably within their own country and probably to a big urban centre, to a city nearby. They'll then work and send money back to their family.
So migration tends to be relatively local and small scale. Now, I was fascinated by the way the UN justifies its claim that 200 million people will become climate refugees.
It doesn't. The UN told me it cannot comment in any way on the accuracy of a figure we did not produce.
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