‘Climate Refugees’ as Dawning Catastrophe? A Critique of the Dominant Quest for Numbers

While the evidence about climate change is increasingly being corroborated, scientific and public interest in the scale and scope of the social changes associated with global warming is constantly rising. This holds especially true for the impact of climate change on patterns of human flight and migration. However, concern with ‘climate refugees’2 often appears to be driven by a certain fascination with catastrophic images and results in a quest for ever larger numbers. Paradigmatic in this regard is the prominent assessment of the Oxford-based researcher Norman Myers who predicted more than 200 million climate-induced refugees by 2050 (Myers 2002). Although this figure is certainly only a rough estimate, it is cited by many reports on the social impacts of climate change. In recent years a number of studies have been added to this literature; their conclusions give ambiguous results about the exact figures, with some of them exaggerating the numbers even further: 50 million by 2010 (UNU-EHS 2005), 50 million by 2060 (UNEP 2008), 250 million by 2050 (Christian Aid 2009), to name but a few (for a complete list see table 16.1). The UN humanitarian affairs office estimates that there are 20 million people displaced by climate-related causes as of today (IDMC/OCHA 2009). It therefore does not come as a surprise that the issue of climate refugees has been put on the political agenda as well, as for instance by UNHCR (Guterres 2008; UNHCR 2009), the “Solana Report” (High Representative and European Commission 2008), the UNFCCC secretariat (UNFCCC 2007), and has even finally become a topic at the UNFCCC climate negotiations (IRIN 2009). Recently, EU development commissioner Karel de Gucht even projected a number as high as 300 million climate refugees by 2010 in his plea for an increase in ODA spending (Raupp 2009).