Transcriber: Ngân Lê Phạm Tuyết Reviewer: Mariela Rodio
Imagine we’ve cut down all the forests around.
Imagine the temperature keeps rising.
It's the hottest summer you've experienced.
Crops fail and prices increase.
Suddenly the sky cracks open and it pours down rain as much as
it should have during the last months. But within days, floods!
Roads collapse, the city is cut off.
Supply chains fail, jobs are lost.
Panic, riots, disaster!
Imagine this city we love, often among the top most livable cities
in the world can no longer offer you what it does today.
I’m going to ask you two questions.
With this scenario in mind,
would you try moving elsewhere, where you could enjoy the climate,
find affordable food and a more stable job?
Or, what if you can’t move?
What if you don’t want to leave your entire home, your family,
your friends, your life behind?
Would you stay and try to find ways
to make it work for you again?
Think about it.
What would it take for a place to become uninhabitable for you?
It’s not an easy call to make. Either way, whether you move or stay,
all you would be doing is try to find a good life for yourself
and your loved ones.
The mainstream narrative around this topic goes something like this
Climate change will cause mass international displacement of people,
and that’s something to be afraid of.
Today, I want to emphasize that there’s more to it.
Thanks to the work many of us are doing from different fronts,
it looks a bit more like this.
To start with, people seldom migrate for one reason alone, but a combination.
This combination of factors is sometimes tragic.
sometimes logical, sometimes a mix of both.
Remember the choices you made earlier?
Migration can take many forms.
It can be long term, long distance back and forth, undocumented.
And it can change throughout time, too.
For example, I migrated because of a mix of love and opportunities that
I didn't have back home.
I thought I’d move back to Ecuador after university, but life happens
and here I am several years later.
There’s still much to learn about this topic, but what we do know
is that people who move, generally don’t move too far away.
They tend to move to the place close and familiar to them.
They generally don’t cross international borders first.
When they do, they go to neighboring countries.
And even fewer move to entirely new continents.
Some people sustain relations in more than one place,
exchanging all sorts of resources, things and ideas.
So what I'm trying to say is climate change,
the climate crisis may be one of the reasons why people migrate.
But it's not the only one.
Now. Is the climate changing? Yes
Is that an entirely new thing? No
But at this rate, and caused by our own activities, it sure is.
Now, what about migration? Is that a 20th or 21st-century phenomenon?
No.
Homo sapiens, our species.
Believe it or not, remember it or not, have always been on the move.
And not least of all, because conditions in the environment changed.
Here's an example of the mainstream narrative.
One day I was discussing this topic with a group of smart
and caring people who decided to work on a campaign about climate refugees.
Now, you may have your own understanding of who refugees are.
And today we've heard powerful stories that broaden these narratives.
And it actually also has a very specific legal definition
that comes with its own set of rights and that matters too.
The UN Refugee Convention does not apply
to people fleeing environmental change.
So at this point in the discussion, I was feeling a bit frustrated
that something as complex as environmental mobilities
was being summarised into a single outcome.
An outcome that has also very little political support.
Let’s remember for a second, we’re also in an age of fences,
walls, borders.
More lines are being drawn between “us” and “them”,
us and the other because of nationality,
race, gender, ethnicity.
Who we choose to love.
And so many other markers of difference in this context.
Speaking of millions of potential migrants may raise awareness,
but may also sound and feel
like a threat to people trying to keep their borders shut
from unwanted others.
So how else can we channel the energy and support
for people affected by environmental change?
We’ll need global responses, true.
And these may include international protection.
But we’ll also need to listen carefully and act locally too.
After all, these aren’t only issues of migration management,
humanitarian aid or development work.
It’s ultimately about justice.
Social justice, mobility justice.
Climate justice, environmental justice.
Mobilities and immobilities of people
during the age of climate change are intrinsically related
with the ways in which we produce, reproduce, consume
and discard in this late stage of capitalism.
Especially the way we consume in places like Europe and the Global North.
A way marked historically by colonialism and based on an imperial way of living,
have very real impacts on environmental
and mobility dynamics in places like Indonesia in the Global South.
But not only. The world we live in is complex and made up of different systems.
What if, instead of thinking of this topic only in terms of climate change,
we thought in more broad terms of our relationship with the environment,
the ways we sustain life and produce?
In my journey as a curious learner,
I often have the opportunity to navigate different ways of knowing
and being in the world.
One day I was interviewing a community organizer to understand
how people affected by environmental change
in a recent disaster could access support and aid?
I was interested in terminology,
so I asked a torrent of questions that they answered patiently.
What about environmental migrants? What about refugees?
What about displaced people? What about disaster victims and survivors?
Finally pretty annoyed, they snapped back. They’re just regular people!
Just regular people. What a sobering comment for me!
You see researchers and policymakers work with categories, labels, boxes.
And it makes sense for the kind of work we do.
But real life on the ground transcends these categories.
Just regular people.
People with diverse needs beyond what a legal category may imply.
People who want a home, a job.
People with knowledge on the environment who could work sustainably and pay taxes.
People with potential. People with stories People with dreams.
Just regular people, like you. Like me.
Here are a few things I hope you can take away from today.
One:
Think about the questions I asked earlier and remember many factors shape migration.
Decisions and capabilities of people to move or stay are embedded in social,
economic, political structures.
For thousands of years, we’ve been on the move and some of us still are.
Because we do and don’t do this in different ways,
effective responses will need to take this diversity seriously.
Two.
Think beyond the mainstream narrative.
There are so many ways to address the intersections of environment,
climate change and mobilities.
We need to include more voices to understand how we got here
and what we wanna do about it.
If you care about this topic, I ask you to dig deeper.
Three:
Just regular people, right?
We all share this one planet with each other and many other life forms too.
Humans have the same rights.
The right to a healthy environment.
What if we could really exercise the right to choose if we migrate
or if we stay? And to do so with dignity.
This community in the picture is collectively asking questions like those.
In a self-organized manner they’re trying to build sustainably.
As I conclude, I want to invite you to think
of environment mobilities as a plural landscape.
A beautiful choir of diverse voices.
Beyond the questions that are already being asked, like, why do people migrate?
How many migrants? When will they come?
What if instead, we cared about questions like, how can we respect rights,
self-determination and dignity?
Or how can we secure a healthy environment,
a healthy life on this planet for all its inhabitants?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)