Scientists at ETH Zurich, one of the world’s leading universities in science and technology, have produced a report on the effects of climate change by 2050 on 520 of the world’s largest cities across the northern hemisphere. Based on the modest assumption of global warming of 1.4 degrees centigrade, this report claims that the effects will lead to their climate resembling places that are 1,000 kilometres nearer the equator. London will be as hot as Barcelona or Istanbul today and Paris will feel like drought-troubled Canberra in Australia.
Across Europe, summers and winters will get warmer, with average increases of 3.5 degrees and 4.7 degrees centigrade respectively. Malta’s summers will come at a cost with heatwaves beyond 40 degrees centigrade and severe droughts increasingly frequent.
If, as predicted, the effects of climate change increase in sub-Saharan Africa – leading to extreme rainfall combined, perversely, with frequency of intense drought – this will inevitably drive up the number of immigrants to Europe.
What caused a crisis in 2015-16 will seem like a trickle. Mass migration may become unstoppable.
Is Europe prepared for this? Malta is a frontline EU State. Just a few weeks ago, following the European party elections, populist parties notched up some successes at the ballot box.
But the mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties came away believing they had won the argument against the racists and xenophobes. This may turn out to have been complacent given the existential threats posed by climate change.
Part of the reason for the lack of a populist surge, I suspect, is that overall migration numbers to Europe are significantly down on the mass exodus of 2015.
Moreover, governments have scooped up some far-right policies and toughened their tone. Deportation has become the norm. Order, it seems, has been restored.
But none of the fundamental problems that came to light four or five years ago has been solved. The boats are still coming. Large launches splutter across the Mediterranean until abandoned by people smugglers. It is the drowning season again. Since January, about 2,000 people have crossed from North Africa to Italian waters and almost 350 have died en route.
That’s a death rate of almost 20 per cent. At every stage of the migration process, the failures become apparent. And the future 30 years hence, as climate change takes hold, becomes bleak.
Pressure mounts on the failed State that is Libya to hold the immigrants who have made the trek across the Sahara to the shores of the Mediterranean. An aid worker has described one detention centre in Libya as “like a slum city in some post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie”. The depravity of these camps, far from diverting migrants from their trudges north and west, merely encourage them to take greater risks to escape their desperate plight.
It is the drowning season again. Since January, about 2,000 people have crossed from North Africa to Italian waters and almost 350 have died en route
These are the realities of the 21st century exodus. The European Union, gripped by panic in 2015, tried to shut the gates as fast as it could. Yet all that happened was a displacement of the crisis. The camps on the Greek islands are bursting at the seams. Turkey, which was paid billions by the EU to act as a holding pen for Syrian refugees, has 3.6 million refugees under temporary protection, nearly half of them children. It is rapidly closing the camps.
The largest in Turkey, at Suruc, which held 35,000 inhabitants, shut last month. Syrians will now face a grim choice of either heading for the Turkish cities and becoming a part of the urban underclass, or going back to their shattered homeland. There is actually a third, desperate option: to make another bid to enter Europe.
Europe thought that technology might provide the answer. Niger, a transit country for refugees that links the misery of the sub-Sahara to the fractious mess of Libya, has been identified as the place where migration can be brought under control. With EU help, the country is becoming a data hub for biometric information fingerprints and facial images of everyone crossing Niger’s borders.
This will eventually allow EU frontier guards to reject migrants without proper documentation. The system, when it is fully operational, will hand to African States like Niger the ultimate responsibility for protecting Europe. But human rights activists say that it concentrates too much power with the Niger government, which can use the data against its own citizens.
It is all that Europe has got to protect itself, apart from the tools it claims to abhor: the handcuffed procession to the airport; the barbed wire around the detention centres. The migration crisis is no longer something that can be controlled to fit the European election cycle. It is permanent. And climate change will make it even more pressing.
The failure to think through the consequences lies mainly with the parties of the centre-left and centre-right, which have been too easily cowed by extremist challengers of the far-right. In the long term, western governments, especially in Europe, will have to find policies that treat migration as a labour asset while filtering newcomers to ensure they don’t overwhelm smaller countries, such as Malta.
According to the annual report of the European Asylum Support Office, the number of people seeking asylum in Europe rose by 11 per cent to 290,000 this year. The agency suggests the rise will be temporary, with overall numbers far below 2015 during the Syrian civil war when 1.4 million people sought asylum in Europe, with political consequences which are still being felt to this day.
Since falling birth rates plague many European countries, teaching migrants the local language and easing them into the workforce has to be a route forward. But the case must be developed and presented with conviction. The far right capitalises on fear of migrants. When communities experience them in the flesh, a more nuanced politics usually emerges.
The defining issue the ETH Zurich scientists have highlighted is that the distinction between refugee and economic migrant will become meaningless as people flee the climate change catastrophe that is making their countries uninhabitable.
Like it or not, every European society – including Malta – will have to come to some kind of peaceful, mutually agreed coexistence with newcomers because nothing that has been tried shows any sign of persuading people in desperate need that they should stay put. Climate change will exacerbate the situation.