Climate Refugees: Why Measuring the Immeasurable Makes Sense Beyond Measure

Climate change-related human movement typically occurs within a complex web of commingled contributory causative factors. Hence the multicausality inherent in human movement makes attribution or disaggregation of causality an almost intractable problem. Nevertheless, climate change is now widely recognized as a key contributing migration push factor. Moreover, there is agreement among experts that its contribution to migration, relative to other causes, is growing. This suggests a possible, if not probable, influx in “climate refugees” (Reeves and Jouzel 2010), although this term is contested in the literature (cf. Zetter 2017; Ahmed 2018; see Box 1). Adopting a posture of “preparedness” emerges as an important priority for effective adaptation to climate change, where “migration” is seen not as a “failure to adapt” but rather as a “strategy to survive”. This discourse argues that quantitative scenarios of “climate refugees” are an essential prerequisite for anticipatory adaption to climate change