The Climate Issue We're Not Talking About

Our world is in crisis. One hardly needs to begin listing the series of social, cultural, economic and political battlegrounds that have come to define the past few years. This year has not given us much reason to hope for expedited or simple solutions to these issues, but it has given us one cause for optimism: the rapid ascent of climate as a leading issue in public discourse.

Perhaps the difficulty with climate change is that it offers one of the most comprehensive challenges we have ever faced. The media is trying its best to grapple with its enormity, featuring pieces on falling biodiversity, the depletion of fisheries and aquifers, melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels, deforestation and unsustainable dietary choices, waste and pollution, and even the potential impact of the climate crisis on our mental health. There is one thing we are not talking about, however: migration. 

There might be a few reasons for this. First, there’s the perception that it’s not happening here — and by here I mean the North Atlantic, which is, after all, the ‘center’ of our little world. Second, it’s a medium-term issue: with such a plethora of observable climate impacts already affecting the quotidian, it seems difficult to focus on — or even properly conceptualise — something seemingly so intangible. 

But here’s why it’s important: think back to 2015, a year during which approximately two and a half million refugees and asylum-seekers migrated to Europe — and during which the Union suffered a political crisis that rivalled 2008. Suddenly, finger-pointing became the modus operandi, and “not our responsibility” the motto to go with. Less well-endowed Southern European countries questioned — and rightly so — why they should bear the burden while their richer Northern counterparts leaned back in their seats. (Actually, almost everybody leaned back: Germany took roughly 30 percent of all migrants, while Sweden and Hungary took 13 and 7 percent respectively.)

Beyond the North-South divide and the logistical challenges of even temporarily settling two and a half million people, the migration crisis exacerbated existing sociopolitical tensions between liberal-leaning governments and their citizens, who for the most part felt betrayed by the neoliberalism of the past two decades. The surge of anti-immigrant rhetoric in virtually every European country is uncontroversial — and even though the last few years have yielded liberal champions like Macron and Pedro Sánchez, it is clear that a real fear of the other has taken hold of the continent. Even in countries that are, by almost all metrics, progressive — think Norway and Sweden — tougher border control is increasingly becoming a bipartisan issue. 

Now — what does climate have to do with this? Let’s cast an eye to the world map. The areas that are most vulnerable to climate generally lie around the equator, and are also generally the driest. The most obvious problem for these areas are rising global temperatures. The tricky thing is, when we speak about the now-improbable best-case 1.5º C scenario, we mean a 1.5º increase in average temperatures, including the oceans, which are much slower to warm. In practice, this could mean up to a 4.5º average increase on land. Especially in areas with poorly developed infrastructure — read North and Sub-Saharan Africa — this increase has dire knock-on effects, including crop losses, decaying urban infrastructure such as transport and electricity, and a surge in communicable diseases. 

Blatant as this problem is, the more pressing one is water: while European policy-makers are quietly calling attention to warmer summers and declining water deposits, alarm bells are ringing in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s estimated that as early as 2025, Egypt will be under severe water stress, with Libya, Algeria, and virtually the entire Middle East to follow soon after. For the North Atlantic, water stress might not mean big trouble — just import it! you’re probably thinking. Not so fast. Governments in North Africa have a very tight margin for error: while many economies in the region are undergoing meaningful development, they aren’t stable enough to easily compensate for water stress via their own devices. If you think back to 2011, a fateful year for North African societies, you’ll recall that one of the major drivers of social unrest was the steep 40% hike in the prices of basic commodities, water and grain among them. 

While the unrest of the Arab Spring largely dissipated, the sociopolitical tensions that caused it did not — they’re still there — and a similar price hike could have similarly undesirable consequences. If we throw intra-regional resource conflicts into the mix, we have ourselves a ticking time-bomb. Let’s grant, for a second, that the water stress is adroitly managed by government planners, and that socioeconomic tensions are quelled or, at the very least, not fanned: we’re still left with an arid and rapidly warming region that houses over 380 million vulnerable people who, sooner or later, by sheer force of self-preservation, are going to be propelled into continental Europe. 

Even if we dare disregard the unavoidably noxious effects of widespread xenophobia, those are still 380 million people that would need to be relocated, acclimated, and integrated. In 2015, the refugees heightened already-growing nationalistic anxieties, but they also posed a complex logistical problem for those countries who were willing to settle them. Even well-to-do Germany struggled to process and settle the 790,000 they took (so much so that they quietly hired McKinsey to help them). What about three hundred times that number?

This is a problem that, thus far, has very few viable solutions — but it is a problem that must be considered carefully and at length. Failure to do so might mean, without exaggeration, the collapse of Europe.