Not so Clear and Present Danger: The power of narratives in climate politics.

Figure 1: a selection of mainstream media headlines about climate migration

By Jacob Page

Few political issues are so eminently connected to objective, rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific knowledge as climate change. The issue's foremost institutional body – the IPCC – communicates on behalf of an international brigade of scientists: meteorologists, geologists, physicists, marine biologists, glaciologists, and occasionally even the lesser-spotted paleoethnobotanist.

But for all the academic papers and data that dominate the material landscape of climate change, and there are a lot of papers – some 45,000 are cited in an average IPCC report – our perceptions of climate change are primarily conditioned through words, tales, and narratives.

Beyond the caricatured ‘bad actors’ – those who deny that a changing climate is bad, those who deny that human activity causes climate change, and those who simply deny that the climate is changing at all – there is an array of establishment voices and corporate interests that influence (often for the worse) the way that our planet’s climate story is told.

From journalists across the political spectrum, to the communications of large corporations grappling with their environmental impact, and the fossil-funded misinformation think tanks on Tufton Street, the supposedly objective nature of climate change is refracted through ideological lenses on its way to the public’s consciousness.

This is bought into keen focus by climate migration.

The existence and character of climate migration is hotly contested in academia. Indeed, humans have been migrating for environmental reasons longer than homo sapiens has been deemed able to sapere. It is also true that today, environmental pressures on agriculture, rising sea levels, and droughts are increasing the risk of displacement.

But fundamentally, shifting migration patterns that a changing climate may bring about are as much a question of resources, politics, and accountability, as they are a question of environment.

Just like how small boat migration represents merely 2% of total immigration to the UK, but captures a disproportionately bloated proportion of political and media airtime, the spectral figure of the climate refugee has been similarly dislocated from the reality of climate-induced migration.  

In this sense, debate over how, what, and why climate migration might or might not be occurring becomes more-or-less irrelevant. Narrative takes over, and speaks its existence into the collective consciousness. Here, it is communicators, journalists, and agenda-makers in the corporate and civil spheres that dominate the conversation. In particular, mass media has historically had the principal influence over public opinion on matters of foreign policy and immigration.

So, how do British media talk about climate migration? The following quotes are from articles explicitly concerned with climate migration, published in print and online in mainstream British papers between 2020-2022.

The first victim of reporting on climate migration is nuance. Uncertainty is an undesirable news value, and as such journalists (representing the breadth of the political spectrum) tend to obliterate the complexity of as-of-yet unrealised climate migration. Climate change “will bring about mass movements” (The Times), which “will be inevitable” (The Guardian).

This sense of fatalism is compounded by the profligate use of rhetoric that exaggerates the nature of climate migration. “Flood[s] of refugees” (The Telegraph), and “huge new wave[s]” (The Guardian) of climate migrants are abound; a veritable “exodus” (The Times) is afoot. We are told they may number “1.2bn by 2050” (The Guardian).

 Figure 2: Lead imagery from articles on climate migration

Although such emotive – even Biblical – rhetoric might trigger empathy and action from Britons and our political representatives, such an apocalyptic narrative also introduces the potential for fear, anxiety, and hostility towards our theoretical climate migrant. Words are important. ‘floods’ are destructive forces, after all.

And this particular ‘flood’ is described as hurtling towards Europe (an assertion which flies in the face of dozens of studies that have found environmental migration to be internal and regional, not international). This is where the right has stepped in. Amidst the media’s whispers of potential disaster and upheaval that climate migration may cause, a resurgent vanguard of right-wing voices (from moderate to extreme) has begun to capture the narrative.

Media voices – across the political spectrum – espouse lazy (and many times debunked!) Malthusian discourses, equating the reckless reproductive habits and warmongering tendencies of people in the Global South with climate catastrophe. These racist tropes are trodden out – describing “African cities bursting at the seams” (The Times) as responsible for climate change, as well as the apocalyptic migrations it will trigger. The intention doesn’t seem to advocate population control, but to control certain populations.

“When, say, food becomes insecure or millions try to migrate here, you will suddenly be very conscious of what is going on in Africa and Asia” – The Telegraph

Increasingly then, the climate migrant – imagined as both cause and consequence of climate change – is positioned as an existential threat to Europe. Climate migration’s potential to create “huge instability” (The Times), “large scale chaos” (The Express) and threaten the “safety of millions” (The Guardian), allows right wing voices to justify the hardening of borders, and the increased surveillance of migrants of non-white backgrounds. Both phenomena are well documented across the UK and Europe.

“Now imagine this flow – one million Syrians at its peak in 2015-2016 – multiplied by a factor of five or ten: the extraordinary despair, the relentless march, and the cracks that will be quickly exposed in western societies and our stitch-in-time immigration system” – The Times

Finally, the infiltration of unadulterated white supremacism into mainstream media occurs. In one inglorious article in The Times, the author prophesises “our continent” (think who is included and excluded by the word our) being populated by “more Nigerians than Europeans”.

Another article in the Telegraph calls for a bolstering of police forces, who should be ready to crack down on “refugees fleeing global warming” and “triggering ‘racial tensions’”, whilst another links climate migration to Islamic radicalisation in refugee camps.

In many of these articles, climate migrants are imagined as non-white Muslims. Not those who may have to relocate because of desertification in Spain, cliff erosion in Norfolk, or wildfires in the American Northwest.

The ‘green fascist’ narrative proves that climate politics are not simply the domain of progressive journalists and the philanthropic campaigns of corporations. Increasingly, and demonstrably if you are paying attention, far-right voices are laying their claim to the discursive landscape of climate change.

In the two years since I collected this research on climate migration in the British media, many environmental issues have become narratively dominated by right-wing politics (think the ULEZ fallout, European farmer strikes diluting environmental legislation, and the successes of anti-migration politicians like Geert Wilders to name a few).

It is incumbent on communicators to be aware of the tensions between fact and narrative, especially with regards to climate change. Whether its casually slipping into sensationalised descriptions of climate impacts, or glossing over the uneven and unjust effects of global warming, those of us who work in an industry that seeks to influence the opinions of the public must exercise caution, and endeavour to understand the complexities of socio-environmental issues before wading in to talk about them.

To be aware of the importance of the words we use, the stories we endorse, and the tangible effect that these choices have on the lives of often already-marginalised populations across the world, is not optional; it is an obligation.