The rising tide no one’s talking about—finding homes for millions of climate crisis migrants

Hannah Teicher (Intro): How we talk about it does really matter, and even when it comes to receiving communities specifically, there are several other terms. I mean, one is host communities, one is welcoming community. I think that receiving communities for climate have a lot to learn from the welcoming movement that's already been underway for over a decade in the U.S., and that has worked with cities on creating a more welcoming environment for immigrants and refugees. I think it’s just that term of welcoming and really making it a positive thing that these newcomers will bring benefits. But it is also about a reciprocal relationship between the existing residents of a place and the newcomers. I think that can really change the tone of the conversation. 

Jacqueline Bhabha (Intro): I think the natural experiment of Ukraine is an incredible example of that. Here we have for the first time since I've been doing this work, which is quite a long time, Europe opening its arms and saying, "Come. And what's more, you're going to have a legal status. And what's more, you're going to have it for at least three years. What's more, you can get welfare benefits and your children can go to school." Meanwhile, we have, at other borders, a completely different response. It's not that there isn't space, it's a question of the willingness or the desire to make life more bearable for people who, at the end of the day, are more or less like you. 

Ralph Ranalli (Intro): Welcome to the Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast, I’m your host, Ralph Ranalli. When it comes to the climate crisis, there’s a lot of talk of rising sea levels and storm-driven tides. But there’s another rising tide that’s not getting much attention—despite its potential to reshape our world. It’s the coming wave of climate migrants: people who have been and will be driven from their homes by rising seas, extreme heat, catastrophic weather, and climate-related famine and economic hardship. Some will try to relocate within their home countries, others across international borders, but most experts predict that there will be hundreds of millions of them. In fact the United Nations estimates that more than 300 million people globally have already been forced to relocate for climate-related reasons, and experts say as many as a billion people may have been displaced by 2050. Meanwhile, issue of immigration is already a political third rail in many countries, including the United States, and has driven a rise in both authoritarianism and ethnonationalism. So where will all these people go? And what kind of welcome will they receive when they get there? Our guests on PolicyCast today are working on those questions, examining everything from the language we use when we talk about climate migration to international law and human rights to urban planning policies that can help create win-win situations when newcomers arrive. Professor Jacqueline Bhabha is a faculty affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, a human rights lawyer, and director of research at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Assistant Professor Hannah Teicher is an architect and urban planner on the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a committee chair for the Climigration Network. They both say major changes to our climate and to the earth’s habitable spaces are coming, and a large part of adjusting to that successfully will involve another difficult change—to our way of thinking about how we share the world with our fellow humans. 

Ralph Ranalli: Jacqueline, Hannah, welcome to PolicyCast. 

Jacqueline Bhabha: Thank you for having us. 

Hannah Teicher: Thank you. 

Ralph Ranalli: We're talking about climate migration, and I wanted to start with really trying to get a sense of the scope of the issue, because it's pretty big. The U.N. estimates that some 20 million people are being displaced every year, and some estimates say that hundreds of millions and perhaps more than a billion people will have been displaced by the year 2050.  That’s quite sobering. I'm curious about what you think when you hear those numbers and how you get your mind around the scope of this issue. 

Jacqueline Bhabha: Let me start by saying thank you for raising this very important topic. I think the numbers are kind of placeholders for big or important. We don't really know, for a range of reasons. Partly because to ascribe a reason to human migration is always tricky because, as we know, people do things for many different reasons. So it's difficult to assign one driving or dominant cause to human migration. That's the first point. So when we say that there have been X numbers of climate-related migration events last year, well climate plus, probably. Not everybody in those places moved and not everybody who moved, moved only for that reason. That's kind of one point I'd make. The second point I think is that for me as a human rights lawyer and as a migration lawyer, the real issue isn't so much the numbers—important though they are and large—though. The problem definitely is … it's the political and social will to address the needs of people who, for whatever reasons, are forced to leave home. 

Ralph Ranalli: Hannah, when you think about this problem in terms of the scope of it, how does that inform what you do? 

Hannah Teicher: Well, I'd like to echo Jacqueline's comment to begin with that I think it is impossible to ascribe migration directly to climate change. I really prefer to talk about it as climate-related migration, if anything. But then within that, there are many nuances. There's the difference between internal displacement and then displacement across borders. There's reaction to immediate shocks, and then there's the reaction to chronic stresses, and there's also voluntary and involuntary migration. I think we need to look at all those intersecting factors. 

Ralph Ranalli: Well, one of the reasons I wanted to start with the scope is because it seems so big in relation to how much we’re talking about this issue. And I wanted to get your thinking about why that is. One theory that jumps to mind is, is it just such a big potential problem—much like some other aspects of the climate crisis—that it's hard for people to really wrap their minds around and engage with it. Or is it something else? Hannah, why do you think this issue really hasn't really hit the mainstream conversation? 

Hannah Teicher: Well, we're still not talking about climate change large enough or doing enough about it, and so this is just one component of that. But then beyond that, I think there is a lot of fear around the kind of hordes of immigrants at the border. There can be a lot of fearmongering around that. And so that may prevent some discussion. Also, it is just such a large and seemingly intractable problem that maybe we just don't want to deal with it yet. But there's so many of these issues in the climate space that are just incredibly difficult to talk about. I've done a lot of work with the Climigration Network and we've looked at how to talk about so-called managed retreat, and we've been really trying to get away from that language and instead talk about assisted relocation because the term managed retreat can really shut down conversations. And maybe climate migration acts in a similar way. 

Jacqueline Bhabha: Yes, I very much agree with that. I would also maybe push back a little bit on your premise. In my world, there's a lot of conversation about climate migration. If I compare where we were even five years ago, it's like night and day. If I just look at what topics my students want to write their papers on, frankly, I just taught a large class at the Kennedy School—not to make it too local—but a large class of a hundred students on migration refugees and human rights. I would say 70% of the students wanted to write about climate migration and the other 29% about trafficking, and then 1% about everything else. I think there is in some circles, quite a lot of interest in the topic, but I do think that we don't have very good answers. We don't have very good solutions. So I think that may be what you are implying, that we're not really at a stage of evolving concrete or feasible or even kind of helpful frameworks for moving the conversation beyond saying, "This is huge, this is scary. We don't really know what we're doing." 

Hannah Teicher: I think to expand on why we may not be talking about it as much as we could be is the level of coordination required and we seem to be famously bad at coordination, whether it's between cities or between countries or whatever level of government, but some of the emerging conversations are around bridging, sending, and receiving communities, or it is about these kind of cross border issues that are just incredibly difficult. 

Ralph Ranalli: Jacqueline, I wanted to turn to what you mentioned just now about the status of what you might call climate-related refugees. In international law, they are not accorded the same status as other refugees, people fleeing persecution. Is there any move afoot to change that? Has there been an evolution over time to broaden the international protections for refugees who may be on the move for multiple reasons, including climate-related changes where they're living? 

Jacqueline Bhabha: This is a big question you're asking me. I would say three things in reply. Firstly, our international law definition of refugee is quite specific, even though in common parlance we use the word broadly. It refers to people who have—and this is what the definition in the relevant U.N. convention says—it refers to people who have a well-founded fear of persecution for one of five reasons, which are related to their civil and political status, so, if you have a fear of being persecuted because of your religion, your race, your nationality, your political opinion, or your membership of a particular social group. The idea here is that being given refugee status is something that overrides the normal assumption, which is that states control who comes in and who doesn't come in, who's not a citizen.  

So a refugee is quite a specific type of forced migrant and refugee is what you are once your asylum application has been decided. They're the same thing. If you are an asylum seeker, you are somebody seeking refugee status and once you get that status, you become a refugee. That's the first point. It's quite a specific definition. And that definition does not include people who are forced to leave their home for reasons of flooding or intolerable heat or because their land has disappeared. That's not in our definition of persecution. However, there are some regional treaties that do accord protection to people who are forced to leave their home including four reasons beyond their control, which may be to do with desertification or an earthquake or something. A: The general definition is quite specific. B: There are some regional treaties, particularly in Africa and Latin America, which have some provision for people and in fact those continents are more generous. And C: In terms of your question about, are people talking about widening the definition, really the answer is no, because we are worried that if we start fiddling with the definition we'll lose what we have, given the political climate.  

And also, because we don't think that "refugee" is necessarily the right bucket. These aren't forced migrants. Refugee is a very particular term coined after World War II, et cetera. It refers to a different subset of people who are forced to leave their homes. In certainly my world of human rights and refugee lawyers, the discussion is really about where the responsibility for carving out legal protections should sit. And it's not clear that it should sit within what we call a refugee, narrowly speaking, the refugee context, even though everybody refers to them as climate refugees. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. It's interesting how much of this hinges on semantics and the language that's used. And Hannah, you used the term receiving communities. What other terms do you think we should be putting into the popular lexicon in order to defuse some of these political tensions and to avoid some of what Jacqueline's saying about people getting scared and closing their doors. Can we change the potential outcomes by changing how we talk about this issue? 

Hannah Teicher: Well, how we talk about it does really matter, and even when it comes to receiving communities specifically, there are several other terms. I mean, one is “host” communities. One is “welcoming” community. My work so far has really been in the American context, and so that's what I'm referring to, but I think that receiving communities for climate have a lot to learn from the welcoming movement that's already been underway for over a decade in the U.S. It has worked with cities on creating a more welcoming environment for immigrants and refugees. I think just that term of welcoming and really making it a positive thing that these newcomers will bring benefits, but that is also about a reciprocal relationship between the existing residents of a place and the newcomers, and it's not just about these newcomers kind of coming in and assimilating into the place. I think that can really change the tone of the conversation. 

Jacqueline Bhabha: And if I can just add to that, I think that's an extremely important point that I've also been struggling with terminology in relationship to a project we're doing on solidarity, and talking about how are we defining the dyad between who comes and who's there. I think that it is much better to talk about “receiving” or maybe “already there” communities than to talk about hosting, because hosting suggests that this is my home, and that I have some sort of prior, legitimate, nearly kind of property-based entitlement to be here and that you don't. And so I am kindly hosting you, but you really belong somewhere else. I think that's what we want to get away from, because, at the end of the day, it's arbitrary where any of us are, and everybody has at some point in their history probably come from somewhere else anyway. 

I think this idea of receiving or already-there versus newly arrived, which tries to get away from a sense of some sort of normative justification for where you are or what your claims are, I think that's a really important point. And I think in the climate context that's huge because this is something that's going to affect, in different ways, everybody at different times. 

Ralph Ranalli: Jacqueline, you've said that even though we've labeled this situation as a migration crisis, that what we actually have is an acceptance crisis or a reception crisis or even a compassion crisis. Can you just expound on that a little bit? I found that fascinating that you were able to flip that equation around. 

Jacqueline Bhabha: Yes. I think what I was trying to suggest polemically is that there isn't a finite amount of space that is already filled up. And so we have a refugee crisis because there's no more space. It's a question of how we allocate resources, political resources, economic resources, human resources. I think the natural experiment of  Ukraine is an incredible example of that. Here we have, for the first time since I've been doing this work—which is quite a long time—Europe opening its arms and saying: "Come. And what's more, you're going to have a legal status. And what's more, you're going to have it for at least three years. What's more, you can get welfare benefits and your children can go to school." Meanwhile, we have at other borders a completely different response. It's not that there isn't space, it's a question of the willingness or the desire to make life more bearable for people who at the end of the day are more or less like you. I think that's why I was trying to emphasize that these are choices that governments make and their publics make about how much to disburse on humanitarian engagement, how much to invest in state institutions and infrastructure, which build the possibility of community rather than destroying it and so on. 

Ralph Ranalli: Hannah, you've said that what your work is ultimately leaning towards, and I really like the way you put this, is creating what you call a new common sense about this issue. It seems like we've overcomplicated it in a lot of ways and piled a lot of political and cultural baggage on top of it. How do we get to a new common sense? Because it seems like we have this big looming issue and we all need to work on it, and a sort of shared common sense about it would be extremely helpful. 

Hannah Teicher: I think that a shared common sense would be helpful. And yet that's incredibly difficult and complicated to arrive at. I mean, we're in an incredibly partisan, ideologically divided atmosphere, and so clearly it's very difficult to reach consensus on anything. I think it partially does come down to framing. And in some of my previous research, I've looked at developing unlikely collaborations for climate. For example, looking at how cities can work with the military, which is maybe not the first place you go, but they have a different interest in adaptation. There are other sectors that also do public health, but even resource-based firms have a lot of interest in doing work in this area, or they have a  stake in it. And so you can potentially build these unlikely collaborations across sectors that could in a way develop a common sense where there isn't necessarily total agreement on underlying causes, but there can be some alignment on what to do about the problem. 

Ralph Ranalli: Can you expound a little bit on that example that involves the military? Because I think that's very interesting and counterintuitive. 

Hannah Teicher: Yes. Well, I was looking at this from an urban perspective and asking for cities that do have a large military presence—where that's even 40% of the regional economic base as you have in Norfolk, Virginia—is there a way that cities can leverage that presence to get more adaptation resources, more adaptation capacity, and accomplish more infrastructural, social, and planning interventions than they otherwise would? I found that there were real limitations to that, but there were some ways that cities could leverage that. I looked at other cities beyond Norfolk as well, and it became a pathway to getting federal funds, particularly at a time when there was an administration that was not particularly open to working on climate change. So there can be some of these back doors to creating collaborations that can potentially be really valuable. 

Ralph Ranalli: Jacqueline, I think you've referred to it as trying to create win-win situations, right? 

Jacqueline Bhabha: Maybe. I mean, I think this is a very interesting and important topic and I think it's exactly what we need to think constructively and a little bit outside the box. Rather than how we often tend to think, which is more negatively and kind of oppositionally. I just have been following this recent example of … you might call this an unlikely alliance that's taking place in Spain between pro-migrant and pro-refugee groups who've worked for decades on inclusion, integration on the one hand and rural communities in parts of Spain, which are many, which are progressively depopulating. This project is called Refugees and Empty Spaces. The idea here is that there is a large proportion of Spain, and I think probably other countries, where villages and small towns are just emptying out. People are leaving. I mean, literally they're nice houses that are being abandoned. People are going away because there's no investment in them for whatever reasons. 

What these colleagues are doing is working with local municipalities, working with the federal government in Spain and working with the EU and with refugee organizations to bring refugees into these places where, look, people are welcoming them because you need at least four kids to keep your school open. And if you only have two, what are you going to do if you live in this small village? And so if people are coming in with children, that's a kind of a win-win. I mean that's just one example of how you can kill two birds with one stone. Maybe. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. Meanwhile, in the United States we have everybody talking about the nobody-wants-to-work-anymore syndrome and labor shortages and all of that. You would think that that might be an area where you could create one of these win-win kind of synergy situations. 

Hannah Teicher: Well, I'd just like to speak to that for a minute. I think from an urban planning perspective, this issue of depopulating and shrinking cities is a really big one in this area. It's definitely very prevalent in the discussion of receiving communities in the U.S., but I think in other countries as well. There is a real opportunity there, but there's also somewhat of a risk in that. Especially if you're looking at post-industrial cities, which are maybe somewhat of a different case from rural villages. These cities have been disinvested, they often have high levels of inequality and high levels of segregation. And so kind of suggesting that there's all this available space brings with it some real potential for conflict as people then move into those places. And you have to look at what that really means even at a building scale and a neighborhood scale for new people to move into a neighborhood that has previously been disinvested, where the infrastructure hasn't been maintained and the houses haven't been maintained. So as much as I want to contribute a constructive perspective, I think that is a real risk. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right, there's a difference between space and resources. And if it just becomes a fight over resources, then you've probably done more harm than good. I was interested though, in asking you about things that you can do with the physical design and physical transformation of the built environment that can help a receiving city absorb newcomers more easily. Can you give me some examples of those? 

Hannah Teicher: I think one of the difficult things for receiving communities is that they're facing not only an influx of population, but a need to reimagine and redesign their infrastructure. Our current infrastructural systems, power, water, transportation are really reaching their limits because of climate extremes. I'm actually teaching a class on this right now where we're trying to look at emerging alternatives, whether it's renewables or other forms of localized power and water provision that can be maybe more community-led, rather than relying on these large, centralized networks which we've been seeing fail in rapid succession, whether it's blackouts due to heat waves or whatever it may be. We're really having to contend with those limits at the same time. I think these cities are in a unique position of having to reimagine all of it at once, which is an incredibly tough challenge. 

Ralph Ranalli: One thing we’re starting to see now in the post-pandemic work world, is a conversation around all these people working remotely and the fact that consequently you have lots of excess office space. And people are saying: "Well, why can't we convert some of that office space to housing and create more vibrant downtowns?" But it turns out it’s not that easy from either the financial standpoint and the architectural standpoint, and it's going to probably take a lot of government incentives to spur that kind of transformation. And I want to direct this to you both, what are opportunities and challenges to really getting some transformational change going in this area, things that are really going to move the ball forward and help us at least prepare somewhat to deal with this coming issue? 

Jacqueline Bhabha: I would say demography is one we can use. Our populations—in many of the kind of places which people would like to move to, and in which people think they would be safer—in many of those places, populations are aging and there is increasing need for workers and for younger populations. I think that's something that one could really use to good advantage. I think the Spain example is one example, but I know in Germany now they're kind of paying for young nurses in Vietnam to learn how to become carers. And there's lots of examples of ways in which people who may or may not have climate-related issues, but who definitely have a sense of urgency about leaving which may be climate related, the ways in which they can also be seen to be desirable in places that have previously been hostile. So I think demography is one of the reasons why we can think about that constructively. And we can be actually hopeful that it doesn't just need great political largesse and a kind of utopian set of political attitudes, which unfortunately we don't see much of these days. That I think is one thing. 

The second thing I think, maybe going back to points that we both made earlier, is that there is an increasing sense that our current systems are not fit for their purpose. I mean there really is, whether it's our energy systems or our legal systems or our kind of way of structuring our urban life, especially I think amongst the younger generations, there's a sense of intolerance with what we have on the plate now and that's going to generate change. We can use that; we can incentivize that. We can, I suppose, teach our students—we who are in the job of being teachers—how to use those ideas constructively. Those are two things that come to my mind. 

Hannah Teicher: Though I think investment in the built environment will be absolutely critical. And at least we are seeing some federal funding going that way and that will be really important. And a lot of it is actually the very unsensational—just energy retrofits of existing buildings and just trying to make the best use of our current building stock. And retrofitting buildings in these places where people are moving in, or infilling vacant lots, can actually go a long way towards helping to welcome more population. 

Ralph Ranalli: What's it going to take in order to get more action and commitment to addressing climate migration? In the bigger picture of the climate crisis, it seems very unfortunate to me it required a seeing-is-believing-scenario, where it didn’t hit home until we really started seeing the physical manifestations of climate change. Even though we were told for decades that the climate crisis would happen and it was coming, we didn't really take it to heart until it actually started happening. Is there a tipping point do you think, here in this issue of migration, where it might accomplish sort of a similar sense of urgency where we will have no choice essentially as a human society writ large than to deal with this? 

Jacqueline Bhabha: I would say in some context we already have no choice. The reality is that, I mean, I don't know if you heard the news yesterday about this terrible shipwreck off the southern coast of Italy, tens of people drowned including children and babies. And we have this situation which is an intolerable situation already in our faces. I think there is this sense in some quarters that our system is inhumane and that there are very urgent changes that are needed. On the other hand, I don't think there'll be one tipping point personally. I mean, of course when somebody has experienced a drought for the first time or a flood, they're probably reading the papers differently and more attuned to climate-related things. But I don't know if that's a permanent enough change. So I don't know if I believe in a tipping point. I think it's more cumulative realization that several of our assumptions about how we live our lives and organize our societies are just really outmoded and need to change. 

Hannah Teicher: And it seems really intuitive that just experiencing climate disasters should make us believe, but maybe surprisingly, there's actually some debate on the extent to which that really motivates action. I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that actually putting forth a positive vision of the alternative and emphasizing the co-benefits to actually having good life outcomes can be very persuasive as opposed to just the disasters themselves. 

Ralph Ranalli: Well, our show is called PolicyCast. And so we usually like to end on recommendations specifically for good policy. So, I'll throw that question out to you. If you were to be making some policy recommendations to people who could really move the needle and who had their hands on the levers of power, what would they be? 

Hannah Teicher: Well, first I'd say my field is more planning than policy, so perhaps these can veer towards policy recommendations, but I'll talk more about planning recommendations. We can plan for receiving communities. Right now, we're in this incredibly opportune moment that we are still early in this phenomenon. So we can actually look forward and think about the implications and plan for it. Even though we don't have definite projections and don't know exactly where people will move, we can think about what it will mean for cities to actually welcome more people. I think one of the key points in that is reconciling economic development and social inclusion, because it's true that having more population can benefit your economic base, but that also risks creating this case of conditional welcoming where these people are only wanted if they actually deliver.  

And so the social inclusion part of it also needs to be really key. And then we also need to be thinking about how we can address the distinct needs of newcomers that as people move in, they are not the same as the population that may have been there previously or that may have left. And also their moving in may exacerbate the needs of the most marginalized and low-income residents in those places. And then finally, we should think about the kind of de-concentration that we're already seeing as a result of COVID and what it might mean for smaller towns to grow and for larger cities to thin out. 

Ralph Ranalli: Jacqueline, I'll let you have the last word on good policy. 

Jacqueline Bhabha: Those are great suggestions. So I would start by saying that I think we need to have much greater investment in safe, legal, and regular migration pathways. So we need to reduce the extent to which people take hazardous and irregular routes just because they want to achieve safety. And that's really urgent. And we could do so much better than we are doing right now instead of pushing people out. We could have all sorts of opportunities to increase regular flows, including of people who are leaving their homes for climate-related reasons. That's the first thing I would say. Second thing is that, and this sort of builds on Hannah's point, I think that it's very important to think about developing policy both local and central or federal government policy, which supports both the newly arrived community and the already-there communities. It's really urgent to support solidarity amongst receivers or already-there communities rather than just abandon them and then either criticize them for turning hostile or make some sort of argument that: "Well, it's human nature, you know that ultimately people will be xenophobic or selfish."  

No, it's not human nature. It's a predictable consequence of a failure to plan, the failure to invest in communities, and I've seen this again and again in places like Lesvos and the U.S.-Mexico border. Initially, many communities are generous and welcoming and humane, but then when they're kind of in fact abandoned or when people are stuck for much longer than anybody expected and there's rubbish and there's no jobs and maybe there's an increase in crime and there's resentment, of course, then that goodwill dissipates. I think that's the second critical thing that we need to do. And thirdly, of course, which is not so much a policy thing, but we need leaders who have the courage to articulate these kinds of inclusive messages and who aren't just looking over their shoulder all the time. We need people who, I mean, I suppose the obvious example is Merkel in 2015, who have the courage to say, "We can do this and this is who we are." I was recently in Warsaw with colleagues, we were working on the Polish response to Ukrainian refugees. And so many people said to me, "I really didn't think we had it in us. I'm so proud of our response. We've always been cast as this kind of racist, antipathetic kind of people in the eastern part of Europe who just take and don't give. And here we are with push chairs lined up and everybody's kind of—not without problems—but everybody is genuinely invested in this." So leaders can celebrate that and reward that. Those would be some of my suggestions. 

Ralph Ranalli: Great. Well, thank you both very much for being here and I'm proud that we did our small part to push this very important conversation forward. 

Hannah Teicher: Thank you. 

Jacqueline Bhabha: Thank you so much. 

Ralph Ranalli (Outro): Thanks for listening. Please join us for our next episode, when we’ll continue our series on the climate crisis with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Gordon Hanson and Harvard University Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability Jim Stock. We’ll talk about the clean energy transition and how communities and workers who depend on fossil fuel intensive industries can avoid the devastating economic shocks that came with globalization and automation. If you want to hear previous episodes in the series, visit our website at h-k-s dot Harvard dot e-d-u backslash PolicyCast. If you have a comment or a suggestion for our podcast, please drop us an email at PolicyCast at h-k-s dot Harvard dot edu. And until next time, remember to speak bravely and listen generously.