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Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World

By: White, Gregory.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: New York, Oxford University Press, 2011Description: 180 pages.ISBN: 978-0-19-979483-6.Subject(s): climate | climate change | developing country | disaster economics | migration | Sahel | sub-Saharan Africa | AfricaOnline resources: Publisher's website Summary: Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World works at the intersection of three fields—environmental studies, security studies, and immigration studies. It argues that climate-induced migration has been increasingly framed as a security concern by policy makers and analysts. Although people will undoubtedly migrate internally and across borders as a form of adaptation to global warming, treating such migration as a security threat to North Atlantic countries is an inappropriate response. It takes crucial energy and political capital away from efforts to mitigate GHG emissions, adapt to climate change, and pursue development strategies that have environmental concerns at their core. Securitizing climate-induced migration is politically successful; it may play easily to constituencies anxious about immigration and climate change. But it does not address more fundamental issues. It also results in a willingness to support authoritarian transit states as an ostensible bulwark against unwanted migration. The book focuses on the Sahel and other sub-Saharan regions in Africa, as these regions are cast as the source of climate-induced migration flows first to North African countries, with the European continent as the final destination. It is based on the natural science scholarship on the impact of climate change on Africa. Strikingly, there is evidence that environmental change actually reduces migration pressures. In the case of the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa, when migration does occur it is more likely to be oriented not toward European destinations to the north but to megacities of the African coast. This is a profound dynamic and needs to be addressed, but not by a security-minded approach by North Atlantic officials and electorates.
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Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World works at the intersection of three fields—environmental studies, security studies, and immigration studies. It argues that climate-induced migration has been increasingly framed as a security concern by policy makers and analysts. Although people will undoubtedly migrate internally and across borders as a form of adaptation to global warming, treating such migration as a security threat to North Atlantic countries is an inappropriate response. It takes crucial energy and political capital away from efforts to mitigate GHG emissions, adapt to climate change, and pursue development strategies that have environmental concerns at their core. Securitizing climate-induced migration is politically successful; it may play easily to constituencies anxious about immigration and climate change. But it does not address more fundamental issues. It also results in a willingness to support authoritarian transit states as an ostensible bulwark against unwanted migration. The book focuses on the Sahel and other sub-Saharan regions in Africa, as these regions are cast as the source of climate-induced migration flows first to North African countries, with the European continent as the final destination. It is based on the natural science scholarship on the impact of climate change on Africa. Strikingly, there is evidence that environmental change actually reduces migration pressures. In the case of the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa, when migration does occur it is more likely to be oriented not toward European destinations to the north but to megacities of the African coast. This is a profound dynamic and needs to be addressed, but not by a security-minded approach by North Atlantic officials and electorates.

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