At Climate Week in New York they were the elephant in the room. By mid-century there will be up to 200 million climate migrants, people forced to move because they no longer have a home. And the longer we delay action to mitigate the climate crisis, the more the problem will worsen, creating a humanitarian disaster and dangerous pressure at Europe’s doorstep. It is no coincidence that a Spanish film hinging on this theme, Mariposas Negras, won the third edition of Cinema in Verde, at the Botanical Garden in Rome.
But who, then, are climate migrants? The International Organisation for Migration defines them as individuals who, largely against their will, are forced to leave, temporarily or permanently, the place where they live because of extreme environmental events or gradual land degradation. A diaspora, in some ways, less visible, because they are, yes, millions of people, but who, often, do not cross national borders, but move within their own country, to less affected cities or regions.
There are many reasons for this. Some are sudden, such as hurricanes, floods and fires that, in a matter of hours, destroy villages and crops. Others, however, are slow, almost imperceptible, such as desertification, which advances in once fertile agricultural regions, or sea-level rise, which erodes coastlines and makes islands and coastal communities unliveable. Circumstances made more dramatic by the social implications: job loss, food insecurity, tensions over access to scarce resources.
In short, they do not yet have a recognised international legal status, but they exist, and they are growing in number. Unlike other categories, such as war refugees or economic migrants, these people are driven by a less visible but equally insidious factor: climate change. Indeed, behind unsustainable heat waves, desertification, rising seas, cyclones and floods are lives that are changing, forever.
The numbers of a silent exodus
To cite some numbers: according to the World Bank’s Groundswell report, up to 216 million people could be forced to move within their own country for climate reasons by 2050, especially in six particularly vulnerable areas. Specifically, the report refers to sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia.
So, is this a reality far removed from us? Not really, quite the contrary. Europe, for not being among the first “victims” like other regions of the planet, is not immune. And our country is also at the centre of this dynamic: on the one hand as a destination, on the other as a vulnerable territory. The summer of 2023, for example, clearly showed the limits of a system unprepared to deal with exceptional heat waves, flash floods and landslides. In short, it is not just a problem elsewhere: coastal erosion, land loss, damage to crops and infrastructure affect us closely.
Already, some Italian communities, especially in rural or mountainous areas, are forced to move to cities better equipped to deal with climate disasters. At the same time, arrivals from the Mediterranean are increasingly influenced by climatic factors, especially from those areas where drought and desertification bring local economies based on agriculture and pastoralism to their knees.
In other words, we are facing an insidious phenomenon that rarely enters the public debate but is an increasingly real problem. And at the regulatory level, the road is still uphill. No EU member state—including Italy—has introduced specific legislation recognising the status of climate migrants. Thus, those fleeing an environmental disaster are forced to rely on legal instruments present for other contexts, such as humanitarian protection permits and emergency measures. But in the most dramatic cases, this vacuum leaves these people without clear protections. And although the EU has launched adaptation and resilience plans, we are still far from integrated strategies.
