Mika Baumeister via UNSPLASH
Sarah Nash and Caroline Zickgraft, political scientists whose research areas include climate change and migration, have written an excellent Op-Ed in response to yet another sensational projections report of climate change impacts on migration that you should read.
We’ll link to its entirety here, but a snippet:
“And that is the crux of such reports: it’s not the changes in climate and the floods, heatwaves, extreme weather events, droughts and forest fires that are to be feared. The object of fear is the ‘Other’, people forced to flee their homes as a result of these changes who travel to ‘our’ shores. Despite summer heatwaves in cities across Europe and associated mortality, wildfires in the United States that have reduced entire communities to ashes, and recurring floods affecting the same communities again and again, the Global North is more scared of boats of people traversing the Mediterranean Sea, of people clandestinely moving across its land borders, and scaling walls built to keep them out. In this worldview, the ecological threat isn’t ecological at all – it’s human.”
We also chimed in on that report, with a few additional Perspectives:
