The Truth About Climate Migration – It's More Complicated Than You Think

**Caroline Lucas** (0:07)
What if I told you there's a nation on earth that is currently uploading its entire history, culture, laws and memories to the cloud? Now, it may sound like fiction, but it isn't. That nation is Tuvalu, and it's sinking fast. Scientists say much of it could be underwater by the end of the century. So its government has started building a version of itself that can survive without the land, a digital twin, if you like. Every island scanned and rebuilt in 3D, every law, every ceremony, every piece of cultural memory backed up indefinitely so that nothing is lost, including the rights to its ocean territories, which are over 28,000 times the size of its land area.
So the aim of its digital identity is to protect an area of land you could walk across in an afternoon, as well as an ocean territory roughly the size of Turkey.
It raises an interesting question. What happens when a country has no land left to stand on? And what happens to its people, their sense of belonging, identity and connection to ancestral roots?
In today's episode, we're looking at what it means to lose a country. And how does an individual respond when their home is lost? Because we've all seen the headlines. Western nations could be swamped as refugees flee floods and drought. It's become one of the defining stories of our age. As temperatures rise, so too will the number of desperate people heading for countries like our own. It's a powerful story, but it's also a misleading one.
So far in this series, we've looked at the warnings from a suppressed intelligence report that the government didn't want us to see. We've explored what climate and nature collapse mean for our ability to feed ourselves and what the implications are of a world facing water bankruptcy. Today we're investigating another claim in the report. The climate breakdown and biodiversity loss will lead to a significant increase in migration, with the implication that many will arrive on our shores. We'll look behind the headlines and discover a more complex reality. So in this episode, we'll be asking, is climate refugee a useful term? What support for those fleeing climate devastation already exists? And what does it actually mean in human terms if you're facing the loss, not just of your home or your town, but potentially your whole country?
First, I'll be speaking with Alex Randall, a leading expert in climate-driven migration and displacement with climate outreach. And then with Aminath Shauna, a former Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Technology in the Maldives, the lowest-lying country in the world. Here's my interview with Alex.
The idea that literally millions of climate refugees could be on the move internationally very soon is one that's got a lot of traction. And you only have to look at the tabloid headlines to know that. And so I wondered if you could give me your understanding of what the truth is behind those headlines.

**Alex Randall** (3:22)
Of course. So I think you're exactly right. This idea that climate change is going to produce this sudden exodus of people from one place to another, that people are going to move en masse, that millions of people are going to be crossing borders, heading into boats, traveling from one continent to another is a myth. But I think it's really important to caveat that with the fact that climate change is altering patterns of migration and displacement. People are moving because of the impacts of climate change. But it isn't in this very dramatic apocalyptic way that it's often presented.
It's in much more complicated ways where climate change usually plays a role in someone's migration or someone's displacement. It's very rarely the only thing that is going on that causes them to move. It's always combined with other forces that drive people to move, so extreme poverty, conflicts, human rights violations. When these things combine with the impacts of climate change, they're all very aware of with drought, with heatwaves, with storms, hurricanes, typhoons. They're happening with increasing intensity. It's when those things come together that we see these new patterns of migration and displacement happening.
What tends to happen, though, is rather than instantly packing bags and heading to the other side of the world, from one continent to another, usually, what people are doing is looking for the shortest route to find safety, right? They're not looking to move to the other side of the world. They're looking for what is the quickest way that I can get out of danger, or what is the quickest, simplest way that I can move to find a new livelihood and replace lost income, say, from farming income that's declined because of a drought, or the fastest, simplest, safest way to move out the way of a hurricane or a typhoon strike. Usually, that means people moving internally, moving short distances, rather than this kind of myth of the idea of the climate refugee who packs their bags and crosses continents.