- 1 billion people forced to move by 2050
- Far-Right resurgent, Left & ‘Progressives’ lack courage & coherence.
With fellow environmentalist, Jonathon Porritt and input from long-term localisation champion Colin Hines, I researched and co-wrote this updated report, initially published ahead of the European and UK parliamentary elections under the title, ‘Migration in Hotter Times’.
- Raise awareness of the gathering global humanitarian and ecological crises from up to 1 billion people being forced to move due to accelerating climate change
- And wake-up progressive, Left-leaning, and Centre-Right politicians to the fact of a resurgent Far-Right exploiting and ‘weaponising’ current relatively low levels of international migration to serve their agendas, and offer voters a credible, coherent, & compassionate narrative to counter the Far-Right.
The EU and UK elections came & went, & our predictions proved only too depressingly correct: Across Europe the Far-Right consolidated its position in June 2024securing just over a fifth of all seats, with a higher share of the overall vote – notably in Austria, France and Italy. This is creating massive pressure within EU institutions, with Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, acknowledging that migration is becoming “a dissolving force for the European Union.”
In the UK, although Labour secured a convincing majority, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party gained 14% of the public vote, securing five seats in Parliament for the first time. Immigration remains an incendiary issue exploited by the Far Right, with the UK in August experiencing the worst public disorder riots for decades following false claims about the religion and origins of the murderer of three young children in Southport. Such violent attacks on hostels and hotels housing asylum seekers are despicable, racially motivated, and fuelled by misinformation from Far Right influencers.
But concern about immigration is not restricted to the Far-Right, a much greater, diverse body of the general public across Britain and Europe are worried about the scale and impact of recent immigration. An Ipsos poll of March 2024 for British Future, which identifies itself as a ‘thought leader on identity, race, immigration and integration’, found that 52% of British people want to see immigration reduced and that whilst 40% still felt that overall immigration had a positive impact on the country, that proportion had decreased over recent years, with 35% now believing immigration has had a negative impact.
Just as for immigration, the issue of climate change shows no sign of cooling down in the six months since we first drafted the report. In June, just after we first publicised the report, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) stated that it believes that there is now an 80% likelihood of the average global temperature rise exceeding the much talked-up ‘Paris Agreement’ target of 1.5°Degrees C for at least one of the next five years, and a 47% chance that it will breach that critical threshold across the whole five-year period running up to 2028. Leading to WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett to comment, “Behind these statistics lies the bleak reality that we are way off track to meet the goals set in the Paris Agreement. We must urgently do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions, or we will pay an increasingly heavy price in terms of trillions of dollars in economic costs, millions of lives affected by more extreme weather and extensive damage to the environment and biodiversity.” Four months on, in its just published ‘Emissions Gap Report 2024’, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that “the world is on course for a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1°C over the course of this century,” bringing “debilitating impacts to people, planet and economies.”
Not surprisingly, we decided we needed to update, republish, and try to alert more people, politicians, policymakers, the media, and the public to this fast-approaching global humanitarian and ecological crisis.
Given the scale of the coming crisis: One-third of the world’s population (3 billion) across 20% of the Earth’s surface could face average temperatures above 29 Degrees C by 2070.
Putting them ‘outside the climate niche’ of conditions tolerable to human life – unless politicians internationally to take urgent action to:
- Cut climate change emissions
- Massively increase funding for poor countries to transition away from fossil fuels, adapt to & mitigate against climate change impacts
- Restore UK (& increase global) Aid funding to support universal education for girls, rights and contraceptive choice for women.
We have retitled the updated report , ‘Exodus Equator’ to communicate the fast-approaching reality and urgency of this global crisis.