Adapting for the Great Climate Migration

The world will forever be altered by the drastic effects of climate change. In 2022 it is more important than ever that we approach climate change looking at the short- and long-term. This year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth assessment report on the impacts and future risks of climate change. In reviewing the vulnerabilities and limits of nature and society to adapt to and slow the harms of climate change, IPCC’s report serves as a “dire warning” of the dangers of inaction on climate change.

In the United States, the Supreme Court is hearing one of the most important cases related to climate change in more than a decade. A ruling against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could restrict and potentially eliminate the agency’s authority to control pollution outputs — and could set a dangerous precedent for government agencies trying to mitigate the harms of climate change in the future.

In this extended Q&A from with New America National Fellow Abrahm Lustgarten, we discuss his work centered around how climate change will force a great global migration, the IPCC’s latest climate change assessment, and the Supreme Court case that could change the way government agencies tackle climate change.

Climate change continues to make parts of the world less habitable, causing animals and humans to adapt by developing new coping mechanisms and migrating away from affected areas. Your Fellows project will focus on mass migration due to climate change. Can you share a little more about your project and its significance?

From the beginning of human existence, where people have lived on the planet has been determined by climate, and historical mass migrations have often been influenced by changes in the climate. When we look at what climate change now means for today, and for the future, much of the focus skirts the core question of how people will experience it, how we will respond to it. The patterns of history strongly suggest that as environmental conditions become more adversarial, people will adapt to that change by migrating — by moving away from drought and heat and flooding coastlines. But because the world now has many, many more people than ever before, approximately 7 billion people, that movement will amount to a mass migration in numbers that might have once seemed unfathomable.

My Fellows project, and the book I'm writing for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, focuses largely on how these dynamics will unfold in the United States, a wealthy country with few of the vulnerabilities of populations in the developing world, but which will face extraordinary change nonetheless. So my work digs deeply into the projected various risks for places across the United States and how they will unfold geographically, from wildfire to flooding to changes in the ability to farm and grow food. While the hardest hit places will begin to feel unlivable, other places will be marginalized to varying social, cultural, and economic degrees, from changes in labor to rises in the cost of energy for cooling. Ultimately, over time Americans will need to migrate in large numbers to adapt to these changes, shifting northward towards the Northeast and the Canadian border, and my book will take a hard look at what that shift will mean economically and culturally.

The newest IPCC report outlines that migration patterns will largely be affected by socio-economic conditions and governance in the near future and climate change in the long-term. How do you see the correlation of governance and socio-economic conditions and the progressive levels of global warming in involuntary migration?

Migration is always the result of a confluence of many complex factors, some subtle and all interacting with one another in ways that are difficult to parse out and to predict. Conflict and economics are often the primary drivers of modern migration and they are the predominant drivers of migration now. But my research suggests that the slice of influence that environmental change is having in those migration decisions is growing, and I think that the IPCC report recognizes that when you get beyond the policy summary and down deeper into the chapters of the report. For example, while the IPCC concludes that climate will not be the primary driver of migration in the very near term, it also describes that up to an estimated 1 billion people will be driven to migrate due to climate pressures by 2050. The IPCC takes the most conservative approach, but the model I developed in partnership with researchers at the City University of New York, and building off of work begun by the World Bank, attempts to tease out the subtler influences driving migration. So for instance, when a migrant moves for "socio-economic" reasons, to find better paying work in the United States from Guatemala, for instance, we look at how much heat waves and drought contribute to their underlying poor economic conditions. And if drought made it difficult for that person to earn money as a farmer, should they then be considered a climate migrant, and not just an economic migrant? Conflict and governance interact similarly with climate influences.

Our models also agree with the IPCC findings that governance and economic conditions are both critical in determining how resilient people are to their changing climate, and what choices they ultimately have in adapting to it.

IPCC’s latest report on climate change warns that there will be greater adverse effects on marginalized populations if they are not specifically considered in climate adaptation efforts. But as you’ve reported, the great climate migration has already begun. Are there any promising interventions at this point to help mitigate the damage specifically to these populations?

Across the board, the effects of environmental change will be felt unequally, and peoples' ability to react to those changes will also be determined by their wealth. Put simply, wealthier nations and wealthier people have more options in their responses, and greater cushioning in the changes and adversity they can absorb sustainably. If the world, even the United States, seems economically divided now, climate change will drive a wedge further between the existing disparities, exacerbating every one of them. This is true on an individual level, and it is equally true for municipalities and nations who must invest in climate-adaptive infrastructure. Adapting to climate change is going to be extraordinarily expensive, forcing developing nations and small island nations that don't have robust economies to depend on wealthier nations and multilateral institutions for direct aid if they are to survive.

To that end, every measure that helps less-wealthy groups fund the changes they need, or which invests in efforts that make people or places more resilient will help smooth these disparities and extend the time in which vulnerable people can continue to live in vulnerable places.

Later this year, the EPA has plans to announce new regulations on power plants and limits on auto pollution next year, but the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could restrict federal agencies from enacting new regulations. How may this affect our ability to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change?

Americans are poor at making coordinated, bold, and uncomfortable changes voluntarily, at scale, especially when they come with short-term costs. But the world is at a critical juncture. We must immediately make sweeping changes that have to begin with reducing emissions of CO2 as much as humanly possible. The only way to achieve this on a scale that matters is to have strong, coordinated leadership from government, and pragmatically, that means strong regulations. Climate researchers and economists agree, even down to the U.S. Commodity and Futures Trading Commission, that climate-related risks are enormously expensive, and ultimately a liability for companies, for taxpayers, and for the economy. It will impose enormous externalized costs, and one question the courts and the regulators are considering is whether those costs should be internalized, and taken into account when deciding the cost-benefit balance of environmental regulations.

Ultimately, I believe, the questions the Supreme Court is considering are about the size and influence that a federal agency, in this case the EPA, should have on our lives and economy, with the implicit recognition that climate change is becoming such an important and decisive issue. Those that argue against the EPA fear that trusting authority to regulate in relation to it would by turn bestow the EPA with limitless power. Unfortunately I think that the argument has become a proxy fight for small government, more than a debate over the merits of the risks of climate change.

But the government, the EPA, needs these tools to effectively reduce emissions from the largest sources of greenhouse gases, so I'm afraid that without this authority it becomes even less likely that the United States can achieve the emissions reductions it is aiming for, and less likely then that the world can contain average warming to less than 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. That means that these seemingly arcane decisions now could well be the cause of catastrophic consequences, and enormously expensive impacts further into the future.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a lot of conversations around Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and the economic impact of stricter sanctions on Russia. What political implications would a bigger shift to renewable energy sources have in the balances of power we see playing out in Europe now?

I've written about the global hydrocarbon addiction for years, and also about Russia's global leverage as the primary exporter of wheat for the world's food supply. Russia's power, Vladimir Putin's power, stems directly from its oil and gas exports to the rest of the world. By remaining dependent on oil and gas in general, the entire world, including the United States, has empowered Russia and contributed to the situation and war we are in today. In that sense, I think we can fairly view the war in Ukraine and Russia's aggression as another war over oil and gas. And Europe, of course, is in a particularly delicate position because it relies so heavily on Russian oil and gas, making all decisions about what to do next fraught.

So in my view it’s obvious that a shift to renewable energy sources leads to greater energy independence, and ultimately greater sovereign strength and independence for any nation. And that's separate from the obvious benefits of renewable energy for reducing global climate emissions and the environmental necessity of making that transition immediately. It helps that across the board renewables are scaling up in ways that are making them less expensive, and in some cases already cheaper to deploy than imported oil and gas. So I tend to think that the war in Europe is both a political opportunity to commit to a faster transition to renewable energy, and at the same time an opportunity to free up European nations politically to extricate their economies from dependence on Russia and on oil and gas in general.

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