Earlier this year, a groundbreaking World Bank Report titled Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration painted a dramatic picture of climate migration in a warming world. The report projects 143 million climate migrants will be forced from their homes by 2050, and this rate will only accelerate as time passes if no action is taken. Near the front of this report, a 28 year old Ethiopian man named Wolde Danse is pictured holding his young daughter. Next to his picture, his story: “In the planting season, it wouldn’t rain, but when we didn’t want it, it would rain. This created drought and because of this I didn’t want to suffer anymore. I wanted to try my luck in the city, so I came to Hawassa.”
Danse’s story is touching, but not unique. He and his daughter are just two people out of a projected 86 million that will internally migrate due to climate just in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2050. Furthermore, within the rest of Groundswell, the theme represented by Danse and his daughter is seen again and again: the distinctly internal, rural-to-urban nature of future climate migration.
The idea of environmental destruction forcing populations to move is nothing new. We have seen in earlier scholarship that need for water and parched land is already driving out rural populations in desertifying Sub Saharan Africa. But too often, these trends are only perceived to be a rural issue. The term often evokes images of villages facing flooded farmland, or trekking across cracked earth. Of course, it is true that climate change and resulting migration will impact millions of people in rural regions. However, choosing to focus only on the consequences to rural areas fails to account for the impacts that this migration will have on cities.
Cities are not usually viewed as the frontlines for climate change. After all, cities are often seen only as centers of distinctly human infrastructure: “concrete jungles” disconnected from the actual jungles. But in a world where lines between urban and rural are blurring and where climate change is already taking on sociological implications, cities can no longer be viewed as independent from the environmental destruction of rural areas.
Urban spaces are already seeing incredible growth: over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas today, and the UN projects that number to nearly reach 70% by 2050. And as the world’s rural areas are continually stripped of their habitability through sea level rise, desertification, deforestation, and many other factors, cities will increasingly be seen by climate migrants as an attractive option. But what does this trend mean for the future of cities, and the people that have no choice but to flee to them?
I sat down with Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and leading scholar on Global Cities and Climate Migration in order to better understand the migration crisis our planet faces. Sassen’s scholarship centers around cities and the forces that shape them. Her book Expulsions, and especially the lengthy section Dead Land, Dead Water touches on the issue of human habitat destruction and the migration it leads to.
In our conversation, Sassen started by emphasizing the severity of modern environmental degradation on the world’s vulnerable populations “We have fallen into a mode where we admire advanced technologies and changes in modes of production, we don’t necessarily admire the small farmer who has kept his land alive for thousands of years.” Along the same lines, Sassen continued that “we are forcing rural localities to either disappear or locate in cities or city-slums.”
Sassen went on to classify this new type of migrant who internally moves from rural to urban as adhering to a distinct “third type” of migration. In contrast to the two traditional ideas of migrants – the economic migrant seeking a brighter future and a refugee fleeing violence or persecution – she stresses that “There is now a third type [of migrant] that does not exist in law. This is a migrant who is a victim of modes of economic development that have either taken away the land that they have had or have destroyed it.” But what is the implication of Sassen’s classification?
Experts on climate migration Ingrid Boas and Frank Biermann argued in their influential paper Preparing for a Warmer World: Towards a Global Governance System to Protect Climate Refugees that “current legal regime on refugees provides only marginal protection, with no specific mandate, to climate refugees.” Essentially, because these migrants move internally (within their country) and for reasons outside our traditional definitions of migration, they are not subject to international refugee law or national immigration policy. This unrecognized status leaves climate refugees in a legal limbo and without the resources of traditional refugees who are granted international protections. In turn, climate migrants are often live and work illegally, which in cities almost always entails moving to a crowded slums.
But cities also have reasons to worry about their future in a warming world. One concern for cities that are sites of migration is the danger when they too become sites of climate degradation. Using the examples of Shanghai and Manila, Sassen emphasizes that “many of our cities are sinking.” And in a city like Manila, where around a fourth of its 12 million residents live in generally low-lying slums, sinking land and rising water can prove incredibly destructive, often to those who have already fled rural degradation.
Yet sinking land is nowhere near the only environmental concern that plagues expanding urban spaces of the future. A 2014 report by the World Meteorological Organization detailed how weather patterns in large South American cities such as Quito, Santiago, and Bogota already cause mass destruction through mudslides, flooding, and drought, which are only projected to increase as the Earth warms.
More broadly, as cities grow in population and demand for resources, they will undoubtedly face straining supplies of water, food, housing, and services . Sassen makes the argument that “even if climate change theoretically was not an issue for cities, we would still have a lot of trouble with our huge cities in terms of how we supply water, how we ensure the right kind of housing – sooner or later we would realize cities the way we have built them are not sustainable.”
However, neither Sassen nor Groundswell are entirely pessimistic about the urbanizing future of climate migration. Sassen emphasizes the benefits that migrants can bring to degrading and dying urban spaces. She cites the “shrinking cities of East Germany with more city than people” as urban spaces which could benefit from an influx of climate migrants.
Pointing to the enduring histories of cities to adapt and survive in the face of incredible diversity, Sassen provides perhaps the most resoundingly optimistic outlook of our cities’ future in the face of environmental pressures. She cites their distinctly “open space” as key to their future survival: “Cities, as open spaces of both the poor and rich, have outlived all kinds of kinds more powerful but formal and closed systems [such as] certain types of elites and businesses. Think of many cities that are 1,000 years old, or even 2,000 years old? Very few other modes that we as people inhabit have had that capacity to survive.” Perhaps this uniquely resilient aspect of cities will serve as a framework for the warming world.
Meanwhile, the World Bank report emphasizes that early environmental action could substantially reduce the number of climate migrants (perhaps by half). And even in the case of widespread internal migration, it is argued that careful planning and investment can make migration a viable adaptation to climate change. Biermann and Boas also note that the “broad predictability of the regions where major climate change impacts … are likely to cause harm and dislocation allows for preparation and planning.”
The future of vulnerable populations in a warming world is undoubtedly dire. However, we still have time to avoid the most severe consequences. We can still provide the legal framework to protect climate refugees. We can still adapt our cities to best serve those who are flooding in out of necessity. And most importantly, we still have time to make the substantial environmental changes that could save the villages, homes, communities and livelihoods of hundreds of millions.