Challenges and Pathways for Change
This essay was written by Tabea Sonnenschein and Omer Juma as part of our Emerging Leaders Program.
Introduction
The climate debate has many facets, spanning from mitigation to adaptation efforts, from cause to consequence, from short-term to medium- and long-term measures and impacts. The focus of the debate is different in a political context compared to a scientific one. For example, many cities spend the largest share of their in most cases insufficient climate budget on mitigation (Negreiros, 2021). This is reasonable in light of the fact that cities account for about 70% of global emissions and that we might only have 8 years to cut emissions and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (IPCC, 2022). The bit of the budget that is targeting adaptation focuses on the short term impacts mostly in the context of water and wastewater projects (Negreiros, 2021), which on the one hand makes sense because the short-term is more urgent and easier to predict. However, on the other hand, climate change is already upon us, epitomised by the increasingly frequent and devastating natural disasters in recent years. Climate change induced abnormal temperatures already cause about 5 million deaths globally (Zhao et al., 2021) and natural disasters about 45000 (Ritchie and Roser, 2021). It is necessary to systematically adapt to the changing reality, and prepare for the long-term impacts of climate change. One of the underappreciated long-term impacts is that large parts of planet earth will become unlivable, says Parag Khanna (2021) in his book “Move: The Forces Uprooting Us “.
The struggles associated with rising sea levels, lack of water, flood risk and heat threaten particularly equatorial and southern regions around the globe (in this article referred to as the Global South). In fact, what scientists call the climate niche, the most livable part of planet earth, formerly between 20–30 degrees latitude, is shifting and shrinking (Xu, 2020). In face of a presumably continued process of urbanisation, Parag Khanna points out, this changing geography of livable habitat creates a new map of climate oasis cities in the north: Toronto, New York, London, Berlin, Paris, etc.. In his opinion, the paradox lies in the fact that the geography of population growth is inverse to that, since most of the world’s population and especially young people live in the Global South (especially Asia and Africa). Parag Khanna concludes that humanity’s future generations live in the wrong places. Moreover, on a global level, the geography of demographics, resources, borders, and industry is massively out of sync with the climate resilient future habitat.
Parag Khanna believes that the necessary and inevitable consequence of this mismatch will be large-scale migration or population resettlement, because we fail to mitigate the impacts of climate change and preserve the livability of the Global South. While the changing climate is a fact and will necessitate some migration, we believe the story is a bit more nuanced.
Looking at a world map of the future climate, it seems like a bit of a simplification to declare whole continents and countries, or degrees of latitude as unlivable. Climate is complex and nuanced, and the exact local reality cannot be depicted on a low-resolution global map. Therefore, such maps are not reason enough to give up on these places. Most likely local communities would not want that either.
In this article, we discuss the idea of mass climate migration as an adequate “solution” to the changing habitat. For that, we first review the barriers to and negative consequences of migration. Followingly, we discuss the feasibility of the alternative option of adapting and preparing the climate-threatened cities for their new habitat. Finally, we raise some open questions about the funding and responsibility for advancing climate adaptation measures.
Why climate migration is not a good solution, especially in a status quo scenario
While climate migration might be to some extent inevitable and hence requires preparation, there are multiple challenges if not pitfalls to understanding it as a primary solution to the worsening climate in the Global South. Let’s explore the consequences of and barriers to population resettlement from three perspectives: (1) the politico-institutional one, (2) the migrants’ one and the last one of (3) oasis host cities.
Starting with the institutional challenges, even in the best case countries today, such as Canada and Sweden, immigration legal systems are not inclusive (Malmberg et al., 2018; Andersson et al, 2018; Filippou, 2018; Dayal, 2022). People from all over the world are already applying to immigrate to these regions for socio-economic reasons or to seek refuge. The former usually move by choice, the latter are typically forced to make a relocation choice to protect their families. People seek asylum due to climate change or socio-political unrest, both of which go hand in hand. Applications of people entitled to asylum can take years even for well-educated and affluent ones. In contrast to that, a student visa takes less than six months. Canada, which is highlighted as a climate oasis region, has recently been shown to have backlogs for two million immigration and permanent residence applications, for people living within the country as well as elsewhere (Dayal, CBC, 2022). Out of the delayed applications, 50% are from India, and people from many countries in the Global South are experiencing longer delays with no clear justification (Dayal, CBC, 2022).
On the other hand, with the freedom of movement in the European Union, around 4700 vulnerable EU citizens are facing a lack of social support and discriminatory behaviour from authorities in Sweden (Filippou, Amnesty International, 2018). Out of this apathetic response to forced displacement, many people have no choice but to take risky, illegal, and sometimes even fatal routes to their destination countries (Garcia Borja and Abdelazim, 2021). A global migration from these red zones to green zones comes with extensive political, legal, and social barriers, and would require a substantial redesign of existing systems.
In this context, people in the red zones should be prioritised in this relocation effort, as they are the most vulnerable. From the perspective of migrants, who gets to decide which people will move and where? The selection of people and communities to migrate to a specific host city brings its own challenges. There are already systems in place to recognize and facilitate the migration of high-skilled/high-income people but there are very limited opportunities for low- and medium-skilled people to migrate to high-income countries (Farbotko, 2020). On the other hand, involuntary climate migration and displacement are already a reality. If we are planning and preparing for a grand migration, then we will have to flip this approach on its head and be community-focused where people will have the right to choose where they want to resettle. Or will it be international organisations or colonial powers yet again making decisions for people in the Global South and Indigenous communities? Various states don’t recognize climate degradation as a worthy protection claim when migrants are crossing borders to seek asylum. This in turn motivates high-income countries to deploy sensors and surveillance technologies to secure their borders (Farbotko, 2020), catalysing a vicious cycle around migration.
We have witnessed massive relocation and consequential refugee housing over the decades. Some people are still living in refugee housing for years with bare minimum resources. Thirty years after the Sudanese 1992 civil war, the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps are still home to 350,000+ refugees. Many of the crises are protracted such as civil wars, famine, and droughts in contiguous nations. About 76,000+ Syrian refugees are hosted at Za’atari camp in Jordan over the past decade, where many of them attend schools and have work permits to seek a livelihood in neighbouring areas. Since 2017, the 800,000+ Rohingya Muslims forced out of Myanmar due to religious persecution, find themselves in Kutupalong refugee camp where their temporary shelters are at permanent risk of destruction due to monsoon rains and increasing flooding (UNHCR, 2021). Given these case studies and our approaches, how can we ensure that the existing refugee housing crisis and socio-economic exclusion will not be amplified? Who can ensure that historically marginalised communities, many of whom find themselves in the red zones, who have the most at stake, will not be subjected to these traumatising living conditions moving forward?
Moreover, are we anticipating new communities to be built or migrants to assimilate into a culture? Which culture takes precedence — the minority one of the host city or the majority one arriving with the migrants? Right-wing sentiments have been a barrier to socio-economic inclusion, all over the world, which usually stems from the idea that migrants are the ‘other group’ and ‘economic/cultural threat to the native group’ (Rooduijn, 2020). When people are integrated into or with a culture, society, and economy, how can we ensure that the process and opportunities will be equitable?
We must also consider that with forced displacement on a grand scale comes the loss of human history, language, traditions, roots, cultures, and identity. Are we ready to tackle these societal consequences? Cultural bereavement defines grief resulting from the psychological and emotional stressors when cultural and personal identity encompassing language, social structures, dietary habits, leisure activities, and sense of familiarity, are lost. During assimilation, migrants also face cultural confusion, alienation and isolation, and depression (Bhugra and Becker, 2005). These psychosocial stressors are amplified when we lack adequate support systems and infrastructure.
Finally, do the oasis host regions have the physical, economic, linguistic, and social infrastructure to accommodate an influx of a large population? Perhaps it will be necessary to create whole new cities from scratch for the number of migrants. In terms of physical infrastructure, how can we ensure that these climate oasis cities and regions will be sustainable in the long run? Many of the cities stated in the climate oasis lists are not close to meeting their climate targets. The massive transition into these regions will require extensive infrastructure development and if not done right, we could be back to square one. Since migration itself does not tackle the causes of climate change, one pitfall of overly relying on population resettlement is that unsustainable life might continue until even the climate oasis becomes unlivable. Although migration is a recurring trend witnessed globally, it doesn’t mean we must succumb to it as an inevitable reality of climate change.
So instead of solely relying on climate migration as a fix, we need to do everything we can to protect the livability of the southern cities. While in some cases it might not be possible and migration may be the only viable option, for many others, it is worth working with the people to protect their region as well as possible to protect the local habitat. Resources need to be reallocated to invest in research, technology, and infrastructure in the red zones to expedite the adaptation.
Can we prepare Southern cities for the climate of the future?
When critiquing mass climate migration as a problematic option, one needs to consider the viability of alternative options for adaptation. The only valid alternative is preserving the livability of southern, post-oasis cities by adapting to the new local climate. However, the feasibility of this goal is not a given. Can we use nature, technology and architecture, in harmony with local community approaches and indigenous knowledge to prepare southern cities for the changing climate? This question is pivotal and deserves more research and investment to be tackled. In particular, it is necessary to understand which infrastructural interventions are most effective in mitigating heat, improving resilience to natural disasters and shielding cities from rising sea levels.
It requires rigorous scientific studies to answer the question of the feasibility of preparing post-oasis cities for the climate in 30–50 years. However, there are exemplary cases of pioneer cities preparing for the changing climate already, which show that at least some adaptation is possible. Moreover, a set of scientific studies suggest the availability of effective intervention options. For tackling heat, it has been shown that vegetation, green roofs and water spaces providing shade and stimulating evaporation most effectively cool down urban spaces and reduce heat related stress (Degirmenci et al., 2021; Hatvani-Kovacs et al., 2016). More technological approaches have been the application of reflective building materials or solar panels.
A more challenging task is to prepare cities for natural disasters, since they are more sudden, powerful, unpredictable and heterogenous. Coastal and delta regions are particularly vulnerable to floods. Some cities have protected their city with modular and multifunctional infrastructure with for example elevated water promenades such as in Hamburg (UrbanNext, 2019), mobile flood protection walls that can be raised in case of a flood event such as in Cologne or some cities in Hungary (Kadar, 2015; Chen, 2018) or Rotterdam which has implemented water escape places that function as playgrounds or car parks otherwise (Fletcher, 2019). Other approaches are ecological buffer zones, dams, pumping stations, dyke systems integrated with transportation and residential development (see the Netherlands) as well as sensor and AI-aided flood prediction and evacuation planning (Meng et al., 2020; Wang, 2019).
Associated with heavy rainfall, landslides pose another major threat to particularly mountainous and tropical cities. Also for landslide risk mitigation there are nature-based solutions, since the root systems of trees and vegetation bind the soil better together to prevent it from moving. More civil engineering-based approaches successfully applied in for example Hongkong are geogrids, soil nailing or soil slope cutting (Choi et al, 2013).
While mainly an issue in rural areas, wildfires can also become a problem for cities through wildland urban interfaces, which can be prevented by removing highly flammable vegetation and placing other combustible materials such as wood far away from fire risk zones (C40, 2021). However, storms, traffic or cooking accidents, and electrical distribution are more frequent causes of fire in cities. Since fire has historically always been a major problem for cities, fire safety regulation for buildings has already massively improved in many countries. Additionally to building fire safety, it is also crucial to protect critical infrastructures such as bridges and tunnels using for example active fire protection systems, such as sprinklers, and passive protection like insulation (Gernay et al., 2016).
Finally, even for continuously worsening processes such as the rising sea levels, some countries and cities have found approaches to dealing with it, such as floating homes or large-scale dyke systems that allow huge areas of the land to be below sea level (see the Netherlands).
Some of these adaptation measures also mitigate climate change, such as green spaces, or can be easily combined with mitigation efforts, such as placing renewable energy sources on the newly built infrastructure. Due to the density, cities have the advantage that they can more effectively use infrastructure to protect more people compared to rural areas. Having this variety of nature-based, infrastructural, architectural and technological measures at hand, it is necessary that cities analyse and compare intervention scenarios to select the most adequate and effective measure for their context. AI methods such as agent-based modelling integrating local geographic information can aid such analyses.
The sheer quantity of possible courses of action described in this section shows that climate adaptation is possible. Moreover, it supports the idea that the lack of climate adaptation of southern, soon post-oasis cities is not due to the lack of options but rather a matter of lack of political will, agency as well as funding. It is undeniable that global inequality, poverty as well as poor governance has played a major role in the southern cities’ inaction.
Conclusion and open questions
Climate change is dramatically impacting our lives and habitat. Cities are already confronted with the first climate change-related threats and the intensity as well as the frequency of these threats will only increase. While the majority of urban climate funding is channelled towards mitigation, adaptation measures are also urgently needed to protect the lives of urbanites right now. Parag Khanna raises important points about the future map of climate related livability on our planet and the consequences of this changing geography. Undeniably some migration will be necessary as the livability of some places might not be possible to preserve. Because of that, the world needs to prepare safe and legal pathways for climate refugees and restructure institutions and cultures to become more welcoming and inclusive for those migrants. However, because migration is only a second best option, at the same time we need to do everything in our power to preserve the livability of the Southern cities threatened by the changing climate. The last section has shown there is more clarity on the pathways for adapting cities for the new climate, while the preparation for grand-scale migration is more complex and triggers multiple political and societal conundrums.
However, for both approaches there are many remaining questions around who is responsible to finance and oversee the processes, and how. The lack of climate action in places where it is most salient is largely due to lack of financial resources. Global economic inequality and climate change are deeply intertwined and rooted in a history of exploitation ranging back to colonialism. The injustice becomes even more alarming in light of the fact that the countries that are mostly responsible for triggering the anthropocene (Western industrial powers) are less impacted by climate change and more likely to remain climate oases. The question becomes if these nations therefore have a larger responsibility to invest in for example a climate fund that can help adaptation efforts of cities that cannot afford it on their own. Meanwhile, funding can be partially arranged through internalising negative environmental externalities through for example a carbon tax or carbon trading, as many European countries have started doing. Without doubt we will have to work together internationally, with scientists, engineers and community leaders and representatives to speed up adaptive measures, prepare for substantial climate migration towards climate oasis regions and improve the climate resilience of the post-oasis cities. The grass can be greener on the red side.
About the Authors
Tabea Sonnenschein is PhD Candidate in Agent-based Modelling of Urban Health Interventions at Utrecht University. Her research lies in the intersection of Computer Science, Environmental Epidemiology and Urban Planning with the goal to improve the impact of urban environments on our health. Her PhD research focuses on developing spatial agent-based models that simulate the health and social impacts of urban health interventions.
Omer Juma is Partnerships and Project Manager at NewCities. He’s also the Founder of 4 Days 4 Lines, a civic engagement enterprise which mission is to increase the opportunities for people from all walks of life by finding solutions that eliminate physical barriers to mobility in the city.
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