Climate change and migration - a timeless story of people
Extract from ‘A Writer’s Guide to Climate Change.’
Hello! A year ago I began writing a short ‘how to’ guide for fiction writers. Eight chapters that take an aspect of climate change - e.g. the science, the technology, the activism - and break it down for writers to use to guide to their fiction.
Each chapter outlines the key issues, current examples in climate fiction and where to go for reliable, unbiased research.
I’ve put this on hold as I start my PhD, but thought I’d publish a chapter. This one is Climate Change and Migration - A Timeless Story of People.
I hope it’s helpful for anyone who attempting to incorporate climate change issues into their fiction.
Big thanks to Alex Randall from Climate Outreach for fact checking.
Tanya x
Photograph: Mohamed Hassan
Climate change and migration - a timeless story of people
“My grandfather, father and I have worked these lands. But times have changed … The rain is coming later now, so that we produce less. The only solution is to go away, at least for a while. Each year I’m working for 3 to 5 months in Wyoming. That’s my main source of income. But leaving my village forever? No. I was raised here and here I will stay.” Miguel, 45, Hueyotlipan, Mexico. Moving Stories, 2014
Nearly everyone gets migration and climate change wrong, even in environmental circles. Facts don’t have to matter in the world building of your imagination; reality doesn’t have to be constraining. But if you’d like to build on the real story of migration and climate change, avoiding stereotypes and cliches, then this chapter might be for you.
But first some examples of migration in climate fiction:
In 2016, author Amitav Ghosh criticized the world of literary fiction for its reluctance to imagine the world during and after climate change. Three years later he published Gun Island, a story of human and animal migration that travels to forest fires in Los Angeles, a sinking Venice and mangrove swamps in the Bay of Bengal.
Water by Lloyd Jones, sees a worldly, young Polish migrant join a remote rural family in Wales. The story is a blend of several cultures - British, Welsh and Polish - as the characters struggle with each other and the encroaching sea rise, adverse weather and an increasingly bleak future.
In The Wall, John Lanchaster drags the reader uncomfortably into the lives of the ‘defenders.’ They guard the wall, a brutal, concrete structure to keep out the ‘others.’ As we travel through this cold, grey world, young people discover ways to love, grow, and find their joy, despite the gloom and danger.
Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army tracks a woman, in a post climate change Cumbria, who breaks out of her urban prison to find a mythical group of women living as rural outlaws. The protagonist's migration from city to countryside feels epic, giving a sense of the scale and difficulty of migration even across short distances.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, follows a whole society as they migrate to find a habitable world. The novel is full of intricate, scientific detail of the technology required for a functioning biosphere.
In Snowpiercer, the English version of Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, a glittering icescape sets the scene for the magical realism in this graphic novel. The leftover humans from a cold, dying world are crammed into a long train that circles the world, migrating constantly to stay alive. It’s full of vibrant symbolism of Noah's Ark, class divides and geoengineering.
Migration can help explore themes of humanity, danger and survival. Migration can depict short destinations from city to countryside, such as in The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, or the vast, intergenerational journey in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. Migration can haul your characters across borders and continents to discover new worlds - or be discovered by new people. Loved ones can be divided or reunited, among patchwork cultures and languages. Migration can draw on the importance of lands, place and history. It can drive quests across sea and sky, urgent and forced, or steady and voluntary. You can populate the protagonist's journey with antagonists, mentors and challenges.
To build your world, you might want to think through climate change adaptation strategies. What will buildings look like in a world of rising sea levels? Will people move inland and abandon the countryside? Will people be forced into cities, like in The Carhullan Army? What kind of government is in your story? Is it a system of authoritarianism, such as The Wall by John Lanchaster? Or is it more vague and faceless? Perhaps there isn’t much mention of government, such as in Water by Lloyd Jones. Perhaps your story will span international boundaries and governments that negotiate in transboundary agreements over migrants. Are migrants building new economies and societies, or are they vilified and ostracized?
Whatever your plot, whether a quest, a stranger comes to town, a coming of age story or magical realism, or any of the other complex plot variations, the movement of people - or other animals - can offer a compelling framework for your story, literally moving your characters through the plot.
What's the real story with climate change and migration?
‘Climate Refugees?’
Do they even exist? During your research into migration, you may find a lot of references to ‘climate refugees.’ Climate and migration experts are clear that migration caused by climate change doesn't currently count as a protected category for refugees seeking asylum. Many of these experts are fighting to find legal ways to redress this. This is because climate linked migration is attributed to other reasons for moving, such as droughts, floods, war and economic stress. It's hard to single out climate change as a unique cause because these adverse weather events and disasters are made more severe and frequent by climate change, but are not the only factor. Many climate impacts are known as slow onset events like creeping sea rises and gradually worsening crop failures. They don’t have the dramatic impacts of rapid onset events, and this can cause even more confusion to people’s statuses as migrants.
Push and pull factors that cause migration.
A push factor might be increasing crop failures. A pull factor might be lack of money and the need to find work and food. A flooded home is an urgent push. Successive crop failures that get worse each year is a slow push towards somewhere more abundant. The type of push or pull factors might determine whether your characters are forced to migrate or whether their migration is a planned relocation. This might be the story of an individual (someone looking for work or love) or as a group or nation (the government of an island state plans the relocation of a whole people.)
In Water, by Lloyd Jones, push factors drive a Polish migrant to a rural Welsh area looking for food and shelter. Maggie Gee’s The Ice People is a novel about the role of storytelling in a climate change dystopia that takes the reader across a world gripped by extreme weather.
Displacement due to sudden climate driven events like hurricanes and flash floods.
When sudden extreme weather events strike, people have to flee quickly, simply to survive. People tend to move to the nearest place of physical safety rather than long distances or crossing borders. People often return in the immediate aftermath to be part of reconstruction and rescue efforts. Other people may end up living for years in semi-permanent displacement camps or other temporary settlements. This is called displacement because people have little or no choice about moving. People in this situation are Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) rather than refugees because they have not usually crossed an international border.
The situations that drive this are called rapid onset events because they unfold over a matter of hours or days with very little warning. They include tropical storms (hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones) flash floods and storm surges. Think back to Hurricanes Katrina in New Orleans, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the 2010 floods in Pakistan.
In the fictional Snowpiercer the train is built during a slow onset event. There is time to create and engineer the new home for a small section of society, complete with eco-systems and its own economy. In Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar, a child is flooded from her home in a rapid onset weather event and internally displaced within the borders of her country.
Migration caused by degraded livelihoods driven by slowly unfolding events.
Long term droughts erode farming income and when this happens farms cannot support as many people. This applies to both big commercial farms and small family operations. The result is that some people must find alternative work. If no local options are available, people will often move. This very often involves leaving the countryside and looking for work in a nearby city. People tend to move individually, not as households. The goal of this migration is often to earn money and send a portion of it home. People tend to move the shortest possible distance, and often move frequently between the city and countryside as drought conditions change. Although people do need to move, they may have some choices about when to move or where to go.
Situations that drive this kind of movement are the slow onset events we mentioned earlier. They tend to last for months or even years. Examples of this kind of migration can be found in any rapidly growing city in a country where agriculture is a big part of the economy e.g Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Bamako. It’s also a theme explored in the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck as workers and families move backwards and forwards in response to the environmental degradation of the area.
Degrading livelihoods is the theme in Water by Lloyd Jones and The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall. In Water the rural area becomes less viable for the family, and in The Carhullan Army the city becomes unbearable for the protagonist, politically, economically and emotionally, until escaping to somewhere else, however dangerous, is preferable.
Planned relocation.
This is when whole communities decide to move (or are moved) in advance of a location becoming uninhabitable. When a climate driven event threatens a whole community, town or village, a decision may be made to move before the situation worsens. This usually happens with the assistance of local or national government and often with the resources and funding to establish a new settlement. This is rare at the moment and accounts for a tiny fraction of people on the move, but may increase in the future. This form of migration is different because it is being planned at the community level and happening in advance of a crisis.
The events that drive this kind of relocation tend to be slow onset events, particularly due to sea level rise and erosion. Think of the Pacific island nations like Kiribati who purchased land on Fiji in advance of a planned relocation in the future. In Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, a whole small society takes part in a planned relocation from a struggling planet to search for viable options for humans to live. Detailed descriptions of science and technology accompany the plot that explores themes around democracy, community and loss.
Movement in complex crises.
This is when climate driven events like drought combine with wars, or other forces that cause people to flee. These situations often involve people in the same area fleeing for different reasons. For example some people may be fleeing violence while others are fleeing extreme poverty and hunger - or a combination of both. The driving forces of their movement may become intertwined too - for example where food insecurity driven by drought is tipped into a major humanitarian crisis by the addition of an armed conflict. This can involve any combination of slow or rapid onset events, combined with other crises such as war or economic shocks.
People in these situations could fit into a number of different categories - but currently are most likely Internally Displaced People’s if they haven't crossed a border, or refugees if they have.
A current example of this kind of complexity is in The Horn of Africa over the last decade or so, and potentially the situation in Central America which combines drug / gang violence with drought and other political crises.
Staying put. Forced immobility.
This is when people can’t or won’t move. Sometimes the natural decision would be to move in the face of a climate driven event, but the people in question are trapped for some reason. For example, poverty or conflict may prevent them from moving, even though that is clearly the most logical option. It’s difficult to pinpoint examples, but this is probably taking place in all of the migration contexts listed above. Wherever you have people migrating there will be people who wanted to move, but couldn't. In Water, the family stays put, tied to the increasingly hostile weather, the older and younger generations in the family making movement difficult. It’s the young adults in the family who eventually try to migrate.
Conclusion
The ‘call to adventure’ in many stories begins with a journey, or the arrival of a new person or people. Climate change, even in the best case scenarios for the future, is likely to cause more displacement of people. Much of this will be journeys within nation states as urban areas and megacities grow. Some of this predicted migration will unfortunately be evacuations as a result of disasters. They will all involve the complex lives of people's relationships to their families, communities and countries. Climate migration offers a rich source material for exploring that very essence of storytelling - what it means to be a human.
“We were trapped in the house for two days until someone came and rescued using a boat, and we were taken to the local gymnasium which was being used as an evacuation centre. I don’t know what the future holds. We are not allowed to go back and live in the place where our old house stood as the government says it’s at risk of flooding if there is another typhoon. We will have to find somewhere else to live and build a house there, but I don’t know when.” Rosalie Ticala, 33, mother of six, Philippines, Mindanao Island. Moving Stories, 2014.
Further Research
UNHCR (The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) If you want to get into the jargon-filled world of the United Nations and the Refugee Convention, to increase your knowledge of international systems and processes this is the site for you.
Moving Stories by Alex Randall (UK Climate and Migration Coalition, 2014) contains the stories of people across the world who are affected by climate change. It’s a short, useful way to grasp the global effects of migration and how it inks to climate change. The first person voices help with avoiding clichés or stereotypes and gives the reader a glimpse into the unexpected stresses that forced migration causes: adapting to fewer food sources, strengthening buildings against sudden and severe weather events or managing with elderly and disabled family members whilst moving across borders or within national boundaries.
Climate Change, Migration and the Law. (Benoît Mayer, François Crépeau, 2017)