Green Pulse Podcast

Managing climate driven migration demands a new paradigm

An aerial view shows deluged land after flood in Sylhet on June 21, 2024.

PHOTO: AFP

Nirmal Ghosh

Migration is expected to inevitably rise as climate change disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, especially those in the global south.

Yet ethnonationalism - nationalism defined in terms of ethnicity - is on the rise across the globe. Managing illegal migrants is a highly political issue in the United States and parts of Europe. Migrants are also a significant political issue in India’s northeastern border states.

But given that greater migration is inevitable and will reshape our world as entire zones become uninhabitable on a heating planet, analysts and experts say it demands better and more enlightened management.

Managing migrants escaping the adverse impacts of global warming would require a global collective response that rises above ethnonationalism, noted award-winning science writer Gaia Vince on The Straits Times’ Green Pulse podcast.

But ethnonationalism is not based on biology; there is no genetic difference between humans of different races, argued the UK-based Ms Vince, highlighting that ethnonationalism distorts the innate capacity - notwithstanding our tribalism - of humans to cooperate.

Modern migration has spawned criminal industries from human trafficking to forgery of travel documents to forced labour and prostitution, often with lethal consequences.

Almost every other week, reports emerge of desperate migrants drowned at sea in the Mediterranean or the Bay of Bengal. In January 2022, an Indian family of four froze to death in the Canadian province of Manitoba as they attempted to cross the border into the United States. They were trying to emigrate from India to the US via Canada.

Ms Vince contends that instead of turning away boats full of desperate migrants - which will not solve the problem - dealing with the mass migration to come and that is already under way in some respects, will require redefinition of the concept of nations and citizenship.

“Human mobility is something that needs to be managed globally” she told Green Pulse. “We have to accept that we are one species living on the planet and that people will move to safer places and nobody has more right to the safe places on our globe than anyone else.”

“We need to find a way of making this work to the best of our ability,” she said. “And that means helping areas adapt... and protect themselves against the climate crisis, but also helping people move to safer locations, whether that’s within their country where most people want to move to, or whether, sadly, that is no longer possible and they are forced to move to other places.”

“Tribalism... is actually kind of the Achilles heel of our super cooperative nature,” Ms Vince says. But she adds: “We are hyper cooperative as a species. That is our great strength. That has been what has bound together people who are not immediate family.”

Complete strangers bind together in human society, in powerful networks, which are the great strength of our species, she contends. And while humans can claim multiple identities, one of those identities must be that of a planetary citizen.

The message is inherently optimistic; some would say almost utopian. Yet the fact remains that - though climate change is one of many drivers - migration is already on the rise.

The United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in its 2024 World Migration Report said that the estimated 281 million living in a country other than that of their birth in 2020, was 128 million more than in 1990 - and over three times the estimated number in 1970. Out of this, the 117 million individuals that were displaced due to violence, disaster, and other reasons was at the highest levels in modern-day records, underscoring the urgency of addressing displacement crises.

In the United States, former President Donald Trump paints illegal migrants as criminal freeloaders. In 2018, the India right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politician Amit Shah called migrants from Bangladesh “termites.”

But migrants typically uproot and migrate to search for work and survival, and do not subvert the societies they move to. The IOM report estimates that in 2022, migrants and the human diaspora transferred US$831 billion in remittances globally.

The low- and middle-income economies also benefit from these remittances, where US$647 billion of the US$831 billion estimated by IOM make up a significant portion of their GDPs, surpassing their foreign direct investments as well. Such powerful economic driver demonstrates that migration, if managed, is not a problem that needs to be solved, and finding pathways is an imperative as more people migrate in a warming planet.

Produced by: Nirmal Ghosh (

nirmal@sph.com.sg

), Ernest Luis, Fa’izah Sani and Hadyu Rahim

Edited by: Hadyu Rahim

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