Out of the frying planet and into the fire: Stories from the frontlines of climate-driven migration

As global temperatures and sea-levels rise, so to does the frequency of climate-driven migration. The search for a safe, healthy, and prosperous place to live has been a feature of humanity since time immemorial...but an increasingly polarized and toxic global discourse sees migrants being increasingly demonized, which makes it hard to have much-needed conversations around the issue. For many migrants of the climate crisis, cities are the end destination, which means that our urban centres need to be prepared for these new realities by adapting infrastructure, services, and policies to create healthy and resilient environments for all residents - old, and new. It’s way past time to open up the conversation.

Image credit: Jody Foster

Featured guests:

Spencer Coyne, Mayor of Princeton, BC, Canada.

Jazmin Burgess, Director, Inclusive Climate Action; Giovanni Pagani, Senior Manager, Climate and Migration; and Claudia Huerta, Senior Manager for City Diplomacy and Campaigns, Climate and Migration.

Links: 

Simon Kofe’s speech to COP26 - New Scientist (Video)

Why cities must prepare for climate migration - C40 Knowledge Hub

The far right is weaponizing climate change to argue against immigration - Vox

Flooded Princeton, B.C., faces days without heat, says mayor - CBC News (Video)

$1.7 billion flood projects still stalled in Abbotsford, Princeton and Merritt - Vancouver Sun

Future urban landscapes: Climate migration projections in cities - C40 Knowledge Hub

C40-MMC Global Mayors Task Force on Climate and Migration - C40

The ‘Climate Migration’ Narrative Is Inaccurate, Harmful, and Pervasive. We Need an Alternative - Centre for Global Development

If you want to learn more about the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, please visit our website: https://jccpe.utpjournals.press/

Cities 1.5 is produced by the University of Toronto Press and Cities 1.5 is supported by C40 Cities and the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy. You can sign up to the Centre newsletter here. https://thecentre.substack.com/

Our executive producers are Calli Elipoulos and Peggy Whitfield.

Produced by Jess Schmidt: https://jessdoespodcasting.com/

Edited by Morgane Chambrin: https://www.morganechambrin.com/

Music is by Lorna Gilfedder: https://origamipodcastservices.com/

Transcript

[Cities 1.5 theme music]

David 00:01

I am David Miller and you’re listening to Cities 1.5, a podcast exploring how cities are leading global change through local climate action. [music ends]

Simon Kofe 00:14

[classical music] In Tuvalu, our islands are sacred to us. They contain the mana of our people. They were the home of our ancestors. They are the home of the people today and we want them to remain the home of our people into the future. This is why this [inaudible 00:29] from Tuvalu is not just a political statement. It is a call that reverberates from our eight islands and our 12,000 people to the international community. We are petitioning and demanding that global net-zero be secured by mid-century, that 1.5 degrees be kept within reach, that urgently needed climate finance be mobilized to address loss and damage, and that there be greater accountability from all nations and peoples to act as good stewards of the earth. But we’re also not going to wait for the world to get [these acts 01:04] together. We’re looking to the future and preparing now for the worst case scenario where our lands disappear and our people must leave. We will not stand idly by as the water rises around us. [music ends]

David 01:20

[whimsical music] The clip you just heard was from an extraordinary video presented at COP26 in Glasgow in 2016 by the foreign minister of the small island nation of Tuvalu, a low lying Pacific island about midway between Hawaii and Australia. As the camera pans out, we see the minister is addressing the conference while standing knee-deep in the ocean. If the climate crisis continues at this pace, islands like Tuvalu will be completely submerged and their populations forced to move to countries they have no connection with.

But climate-driven migration is not something that will just impact small islands in the middle of the ocean. As the impacts of the climate crisis worsened, more and more of us may be forced to leave our homes. [music ends]

[slow rhythmic music] Extreme heat above levels of human survivability, rising sea levels, and increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events are all drivers which could lead to huge shifts in migration patterns. Although climate-driven migration is already happening, it’s set to increase. The latest estimates from the International Organization for Migration predict that by 2050 up to 1 billion people will be on the move due to climate-related reasons. This includes many on the move within their own country, and some crossing borders. But where will the majority of these people go? The answer is cities. [music ends]

David 03:13

[whimsical music] We live in times where migration is being weaponized by far-right political movements, with myths and outright lies poisoning public discourse. This makes it challenging to bring the issue into the public sphere, but tackle it we must because cities need to adapt to future population growth. It’s vital that cities, mayors, and policymakers not only prepare for climate-driven migration, but also that they adapt infrastructure, services and policies to create healthy and resilient environments for all residents, old and new. We have the power, but do we have the will? [music ends]

[fast rhythmic music] Climate-driven migration is a complex and often misrepresented issue. To explore the complexities, challenges and benefits, I’ll be taking a deep dive into the topic with help from three C40 staff members who are doing world-leading work in this area. But first, I’ll be speaking to a fellow Canadian. A mayor whose town was hit by devastating floods, forcing hundreds of residents to flee their homes for days, months, and potentially far longer.

Spencer Coyne 04:32

[phone rings] [whooshing] Spencer Coyne, mayor of Princeton, BC, Canada. [handset clicks]

David 04:40

Mayor, welcome to Cities 1.5.

Spencer Coyne 04:43

Thanks, David. And if you can call me Spencer, please.

David 04:45

For our listeners who don’t know Princeton and don’t know where it is, can you tell them a bit, first of all, about your story? How you came to be mayor?

Spencer Coyne 04:53

You know, I grew up in Princeton. My family’s from here. My family is also indigenous, and we are from this area and we’ve been here since time immemorial. Growing up, my dad and my grandfathers always taught me, “You know, if you’re going to complain, you better step up and do something.” So, in the early 2000s, I ran for council when I was in my twenties and I got elected. And then later on in life, I was working—managing a business in town. And I used to write for newspapers as well and one of the more senior members of our community came in and says, “You know what? It’s time for us to move aside and you need to step up and run.” And I didn’t run in that election, but things got progressively worse as time went on. And I sat down with my family, and at the time I had two younger kids, and I said to them—I said, “I think it’s time that I do something because otherwise you guys aren’t going to have a future.” So, I threw my hat in the ring and I won, and my family supported me. And then we ran again in the last election, and so I’m serving my second term as mayor. But yeah, it just—you know, it’s one of those situations where you can let other people do it, or if you’re going to complain, you might as well try to do—make a change. So, that’s what I did.

David 06:06

I love that story. It echoes how I felt when I first ran for council. You know, people saying, “If you think you can do better, go try.” Can you talk a bit about Princeton? Because I think it’s a very Canadian kind of place in many ways.

Spencer Coyne 06:22

Yeah. So Princeton and British Columbia go hand in hand. So, it was actually one of my ancestors, I guess he’s my third great-grandfather, was sent here by Governor Douglas looking for a path into the interior. Princeton became a town with a name in 1860. We weren’t incorporated till later, but Governor Douglas needed a new route into the interior. This is after the Canada-US border was solidified. So, Princeton’s right smack dab in the middle of everything. We’re about four hours from downtown Vancouver, and we’re two hours from Kelowna, two hours from Kamloops and whatnot. So, without us there’d be no British Columbia as we know it. Just because we were that route into the interior otherwise they would’ve had to go up farther up around Williams Lake to find another interior route.

David 07:09

Interesting that Princeton’s history is so entwined with a settlement of a dispute between Canada and the US. It’s funny how—They say history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

Spencer Coyne 07:18

It sure does. [chuckles]

David 07:20

What’s the population?

Spencer Coyne 07:21

So, we’re just under 3000 officially with our region. So, we’re part of a regional district which is unique to British Columbia. There’s about between 5 and 6,000 people in the region, but it takes almost two hours—two and a half hours to cross our entire regional area around Princeton. So it’s a massive area. It’s a rather large area, all the way to the US border.

David 07:41

The Coquihalla is an important highway in BC, for listeners who don’t understand the geography of British Columbia. Extremely important. And, you know, the area you just described is quite massive.

Spencer Coyne 07:53

It is. We go right from the Alpine, so we go right from the Alpine and the Cascades all the way through to the grasslands in the beginning of the deserts, the ecosystem that we have in British Columbia. So, we’re very vast and diverse, which is part of the reason we have our climate issues that we have here.

David 08:12

Can you speak about the impact of climate on Princeton? Obviously, I’m thinking about the floods in 2021. What are the challenges and what are you seeing in terms of changes to climactic patterns?

Spencer Coyne 08:26

[slow rhythmic music] You know, I’ve had to say this over and over again. We are the front line of climate change in, especially, Western Canada and possibly Canada. Since 2017 we’ve been in a state of emergency just about every single year. We’re in a fire ecosystem which has its own challenges with, you know, old growth deferral when we’re in a fire ecosystem. Because those trees aren’t supposed to live, they’re supposed to burn. Our ancestors would’ve burned the land to regenerate it or Mother Nature would’ve looked after that. We’ve been under a drought for, I think, it’s five or six years straight, which is ironic. Because as the atmospheric river came through and we flooded in November, we were still technically in a drought situation. We’re seeing rising temperatures, longer periods of dry spells. Snow is just kind of a thing of the past almost. When I was a kid we used to get, you know, four to five feet of snow, and now we’re lucky if we get two feet of snow on a good year. These are the things that we’re facing and because of that our aquifers are starting to dry up. We’re seeing more and more intense wildfires because the land is so dry and whatnot. When we do get a large rainfall because of the drought, it either—it just runs off. You think it would be the opposite, but the ground just can’t absorb that much rain at one time. Like in 2021, we actually were hit with three atmospherics back to back. Not just one. The day before you could almost walk across the river without getting wet. You could just hop across on the rocks. That night that it happened, we had close to 15 plus feet of water in our river. So, from a trickle to that much in less than 24 hours. It started in the afternoon and by midnight we were—it was bouncing off the bottom of our bridge. [music ends]

David 10:15

Droughts, wildfires and floods is a quite a combination. I’m sure it’s quite frightening and warning, obviously. But, you know, I think for general members of the public they don’t realize that all three things can be associated depending where you are. Before that atmospheric river and all of the damage it caused happened, I’d never even heard of atmospheric rivers. Had they happened before to Princeton?

Spencer Coyne 10:42

Oddly enough, yes. We just didn’t know.

David 10:43

[laughs] Right.

Spencer Coyne 10:45

You know, we used to call them the pineapple express. Right? And they were just a winter rainstorm. November, 1995, we had a very similar event. It started raining—It was really cold, we had snow, it started raining, and it happened almost exactly the same way it did in 2021. The difference was we didn’t have massive forest fires in the summer of 1995 the way we had in 2021. So our entire region was just devastated with forest fires. They evacuated Merritt. That’s the year Lytton burnt down and then we had a fire just outside of town that was threatening Princeton at the same time. So, as that’s happening, you know, now we have destabilization of the hillsides around us because now the trees are gone and everything else, so it just compounded the problems.

And if you actually drive up Highway 8 going out of Merritt, you can see just how devastating that the effect was because there’s trees and everything that were burned and then they came down and whatnot. So, you know, these are all going hand in hand now. They’re not independent of each other. It seems to be when we have one event, we actually have multiple events. And we had five events during—at least five events during the actual rainfall. So, we had that, we had highway closures, we had gas line ruptures, we had power outages. Like, you look at them and as a municipality, the size that we are and we were so isolated because all the transportation networks were severed at the same time, we were on our own on an island, really, as everything was coming down. So we were fighting for our lives out here.

David 12:24

If you can, just quickly describe Princeton and how the confluence of rivers makes it kind of feel like an island.

Spencer Coyne 12:32

Yes. Our motto is ‘Where Rivers and Friends meet’, and we are at the confluence of the Similkameen and the Tulameen River. So the Similkameen River, if anybody looks at a map, you look at Manning Park, south, that is the Similkameen watershed on that side. And then everything on the north side of that is what we call the Tulameen, but it’s also part of the Coca Hollow watershed. So, that watershed goes all the way up to almost Merritt, so it’s a rather large water system. So, the Similkameen watershed, oddly enough, even though it looks smaller, is actually bigger and it can absorb more water. Whereas the Tulameen side, when it comes down it all comes down into a couple streams and the river—and everything comes out at once. So, that’s kind of where that—complexity of that hits. Usually we flood on the Tulameen side. If it floods on the Similkameen side, then we know we’re in real trouble because it’s a lot of water coming down. [laughs]

David 13:30

It’s interesting because you—Physically, it’s feels like an island, but you were also isolated like an island, as you said, because the transportation was cut off. So, how—in that moment, how did Princeton cope? And can you talk a bit about the impact on local people of that sequence of extreme weather events, you know, wildfires, the atmospheric river? What did people actually do? What did you do?

Spencer Coyne 13:59

When this all started, I was actually in town. I came home and people on the internet were—on Facebook and all that, they were, like, going nuts because the traffic was backing up and were like, “What’s going on?” So I come into town and—So, the Highway 5A is the original Highway 5. It’s now been replaced by the Coquihalla. But the original Highway 5 starts in Princeton, so that links us to Merritt. So when the Coquihalla and the Fraser Canyon were closed due to mudslides, they moved all those people down through Princeton. And then we have Highway 3 which is a—you know, crosses the province from Hope all the way to the Alberta border, it crosses Alberta. That’s the other networks. We’re the only route into the lower mainland at this point, so they’re moving everybody through there. And I showed up and my fire chief is down there with a fire truck, and my [bylaw 14:50] officer’s standing there, my manager of protective services. And he’s standing there and I go to the fire chief and I’m like, “What the heck’s going on?” And he literally just turned around, handed me a vest and a stop sign and said, “Get to work.” So the three of us were flagging until seven o’clock at night when we could get relief down from wherever everybody else was working, and we were just trying to keep the traffic flow going through town. And in the meantime, the rain is getting harder and harder and harder and we hadn’t heard anything official from anybody that this was going to be bad. There was a boil water advisory put out at some point around to four o’clock. I think, it was. There was a travel advisory put out the day before that. Just high rain volumes, but there was no indication that what was coming was going to be what was coming.

So, I got home just after seven and my partner had made me a bowl of soup, and she is like, “Sit and heat.” And I’m sitting there and I just start to eat and my CAO calls and says, “I need you to come to town. We’re going to have to declare a state of emergency.” So, I went to town and—came back to town hall here and signed a state of emergency. And from there on, we didn’t stop. I went home for about 20 minutes that night and came right back to work first thing in the morning, and just went back at it.

David 16:07

I don’t want to make you relive it, but at a high level can you tell people how bad the flooding got? And then maybe we could talk about, you know, how did the residents cope and local businesses?

Spencer Coyne 16:20

[fast rhythmic music] Flooding was the worst we’ve ever seen, and it was made worse because of our flood protection infrastructure. [chuckles] In 1995, they [bolstered 16:29]—the province came in and they paid the [bolster 16:31]. Our flood infrastructure, that was before then [inaudible 16:35] authority was downloaded onto the municipalities. We went down to see where the water levels were. There’s these little set of cabins, and if you look online you can see the pictures and there’s the water running over top of these little cabins. We’re, like, standing right where the dike broke. We’re looking there and we’re, like, just making sure nobody was in there. We left. Now, five minutes later we got a call on the radio that the dike had just broken. And because of the way that—It wasn’t just an over topping of our system. The dike was ripped into the river because there’s a narrowing there where we have an old wooden bridge that was put in close to a hundred years ago. It created a—like a back eddy [inaudible 17:09] thing and it pulled the dike into the river. And when it did that, it came through like a tsunami. It—People were trapped in their houses, doors busted open. One of our public works crew, they were in their truck, and when the water hit them it lifted the truck off of the ground and whatnot, and everybody just ran. [music ends]

And it was just instant. Like it was instantaneous. There was no warning that this was going to happen. From there on, it was just save lives. That was it. Just get people out of the flood zone. We had 300 properties. Doesn’t sound like a lot to a big city, but 300 properties is a huge percentage of our population. So we had 300 properties that we had to evacuate. Four of them were apartment buildings. You know, our local reporter had to get a boat, came up to her balcony, and she climbed over a balcony to get out. There was over 12 feet of water in that part of the downtown, so it was just insane amount of water. Princeton is an amazing community so the next morning we just rallied together and we just started helping our neighbors, and we didn’t stop doing that. And we still—you know, still to this day, we’re still recovering from it. We just got our water system back up and running. We lost two wells through it. We were on a boil water advisory until just this last fall. So three years, it took us to get our water system back up and running. We had to do a total replacement of that. It’s weighed heavy on the community overall. We’ve lost community members who’ve had to leave that climate refugee situation within our own communities, just because we don’t have the housing for them. We have people still living in temporary housing and kind of like an Atco trailer type situation. They came in and they were like a camp, they set it up and they’re living there. We still don’t have one replacement of—it’s about 23 or 24 units, an apartment complex, that’s still not been replaced. You know, in the beginning we all just rallied together, but it’s starting to wear on people.

David 19:05

Well, it’s three and a half years later, it’s incredible to hear those impacts. Are you worried that the town’s going to lose a lot of people permanently? You mentioned some have left.

Spencer Coyne 19:17

Yeah. So we did a lot of work to try to keep the community together. That was one of my biggest concerns. Not to be critical, but we have the Emergency Support Services, ESS is what we call it in British Columbia. They are the people that help—you know, they’re the ones that put you in a place if you’ve been evacuated and everything. Because of the stress that British Columbia has been under, the province brought the Red Cross in to support us. And they relieved our ESS teams, the local ESS teams, and brought in the Red Cross. And I fought pretty hard against some of it because they were trying to place people in other communities and move them out of our community. And the one thing I’ve always understood—I used to be an ESS worker, is once you start moving people, there’s a real good likelihood that they’re not going to come back.

So, as a policy from the municipal side, we implemented a free building license. So, we did free building inspections to try to get your home back up and running as fast as possible, through community efforts and whatnot and thanks to the [inaudible 20:30] and the chief at the Tsawwassen First Nation. He was involved as well. They helped us raise an enormous amount of money, so we were able to give people money. And they worked with the community foundation, the South Okanagan Similkameen Community Foundation, and people were able to make donations. And I think we raised close to a million dollars just to help people offset some of those costs. You know, the complexities around the disaster financial assistance program and getting money, insurance has been a big problem because some people couldn’t—well, can’t get insurance in a flood zone. And some people did. Other peoples thought they had it, turned out they didn’t. We had one young lady who her mortgage was renewed and they didn’t put insurance on her mortgage, so she wasn’t eligible at all for assistance because of the way the program’s set up. There’s a lot going on. But policy-wise, we tried to keep everybody together. We set up a resiliency center, hired a resiliency manager. We had an amazing organization come in and help rebuild homes for free. We had a number of different organizations just come to town. I was on TV and I was just like, “If you can help, help us,” and people showed up. And people came from all over Canada to help us. It was amazing. And I think that grassroots effort is what kept us together. We have lost families. We have people that are homeless now because of that, and they’re living on the streets. Nobody talks about the mental health issues around these disasters, but it’s real and it needs to be discussed.

David 22:06

[melancholic music] Just so you people who aren’t Canadians understand, the Canucks is the Vancouver Canucks Professional Ice Hockey team, and the Tsawwassen First Nation is probably four hours away from Princeton, south of Vancouver. Is that about right?

Spencer Coyne 22:20

Yeah.

David 22:21

Very interesting to me that, really, it’s the community that’s coming together here, with some help from the provincial government. But it’s the community in the sense of the Canucks people in Princeton, the Tsawwassen First Nations foundation and others.

Spencer Coyne 22:37

The province has been super helpful to my community. I don’t want to downplay that. They’ve helped us financially. They helped us every way they possibly could. If there’s a critique, it’s that the federal government hasn’t been here for us in the same capacity, and I’ve been very vocal about that. [music ends]

David 22:55

It’s important to understand. So it’s good to know the provincial programs help, but in addition there was private support needed. And, you know, very much noted your point about mental health. If you were talking to mayors of other towns and cities who are at risk of, you know, whether it’s flooding or wildfires or droughts or anything else, what would you say to them about the lessons you’ve learned from the aftermath of things that need to be done, whether by the city or town or in partnership with the provincial or national government?

Spencer Coyne 23:32

First off is have a robust emergency program. In 2017, I was working in the reception center during the fires just outside of town. We had—I think it was close to two or 300 people evacuated during that fire. And we were dealing with that and I just saw how under-prepared we all were. It’s in the regional district, so that adds another level of complexity. But the municipality’s there to support, I guess in some ways a regional district’s kind of like a county for anybody outside of British Columbia, but it’s not. It’s a special creature that only exists here and, I don’t know, there’s good and bad. But anyways, moving on from there. The big thing is you need to have a program. So we had—Before I took office, we had an emergency program coordinator who came in once a month and, you know, kind of check some boxes and, you know, made sure everything was okay. And one of the first things I did was I got him hired on full-time. He became our bylaw officer so that we could actually have enough work in the beginning for him but, I mean, it’s a full-time position now.

One of the things that we don’t realize is these things are all interconnected. So, if you’re having a drought, there’s going to be issues. There’s—and there’s going to be long-term impacts on those. The heat domes are, you know, complex and all that stuff and whatnot. So, have a robust emergency program. Make sure that you do a BRISK assessment. A lot of our infrastructure is really old, but it’s susceptible to these emergencies. You know, where do we put our sewer lift stations? The lowest point in our community. What is the first thing that’s going to get overtaken here? Sewer lift station. When Merritt had to evacuate, they evacuated their entire city. I think the 8,000 people had to evacuate. And the reason they had to evacuate is because their sewer system went down and now you can’t be in the city. Even everybody who was not affected by the actual water had to leave the city. So we had 8,000 people, refugees, right there fleeing their community, trying to find places in the interior while all this is going on. You know, it’s those things that we don’t think about. You know, they made sense at the time. A lot of these things are legacy. Things—Like, Princeton’s one of the oldest communities in British Columbia. We didn’t choose where we’re living. Most of our infrastructure is 60 years old, and that was inherited, but we have to figure out how to deal with that. So, start making your plans. Start FireSmart in your community. Start looking at your floodplain mapping and what critical infrastructure is within that floodplain and can you start planning to move? It should be part of your asset management plan. Is replacing that stuff, but not in the same place but moving it into other places. Start looking at your diking system and it’s like, “Can we start to withdraw from the diking area?” Because dikes fail and the bigger we make them [inaudible 26:19] the go-to, right? “We have a flood, it went to this height. Build it another meter and a half higher, and you’re good to go.” Well, every meter we add increases the likelihood it’s going to fail. So, how do we start to retreat from those waterways and how do we put green spaces back and how do we use those traditional knowledge pieces that we seem to, in Western society, forget about? You know, those trees were there for a reason, right? Those green spaces were there for a reason. And we’ve channelized our rivers, we’ve channelized our streams so we can build on them, and we have to give those spaces back somehow and we have to start planning for that.

David 26:59

Well, that’s very eloquently put and it does lead very logically to my last question. In the context of this conversation and Princeton’s experience, if you could make one change to systems, thinking locally, nationally, globally, that would better protect Princeton and its residents and cities and towns like Princeton, what would it be?

Spencer Coyne 27:25

One thing, all levels of government need to start sitting down together as equals and discussing these things. It’s one thing we don’t do very well. You know, we’re a top-down approach and unfortunately the people at the bottom of this top-down approach are the ones who are facing and dealing with the everyday part of it. We’ve created most of these problems ourselves, right? Like I said, we’ve channelized our rivers and then we put dikes on them to keep the water back. Well, Mother Nature knows where the low spots are and they’re going to go there. We’ve built in the middle of a forest and a fire ecosystem, and then we haven’t let the ecosystem manage itself. So, you know, we’ve ignored the teachings of our elders in these systems and whatnot. So we have to start looking at it as a—like an all systems approach. We can’t just look at it individually. So, we can’t just look at fires as fires. We need to look at the droughts, we need to look at the heat domes, we need to look at the flooding. We need to look at all these things and we need to say, “What did we do wrong?” Because in—like in my area, we have old growth forests that should not be there, right? This is not the coast where old growth is supposed to live forever. In our area, those trees are supposed to burn. They either burn naturally or they burned by human activity. And now what we’re seeing is because we’ve extended those lifespans, they’ve gotten super dry, they’re now sick because we weren’t listening to our elders and we weren’t listening to that traditional knowledge that was there.

These are things that need to be examined, but we all need to sit at the same table and say, “We’re going to take off all of our bias and figure out how we’re going to do this together, because we are in this together.” And it has to be a mix of Western and Indigenous knowledge and it has to be an all systems approach where we start looking at these things, not as independent of each other, but as an ecosystem, as a whole.

David 29:24

Starting with Indigenous knowledge sounds like a very good place to start. I always think of us as orders of government, not levels, just picking up on your point, because we should be equal partners.

Spencer Coyne 29:35

I treat them like they’re equal partners. They don’t like it but I do it anyway. [laughs] We all put our pants on one leg at a time. And, you know, honestly, we—if we all did that and we all looked at each other—I mean, we all have the same constituents, right?

[whimsical music] I don’t know. I just come at it with a different approach. I am only here to serve future generations. I’m not here to serve myself. And I think that’s what people need to understand. Is, yeah, we’re here right now in this moment, but the reason I ran for office is for my kids and my grandkids who weren’t born yet, and the generations that come after them so they have opportunity and have a place to live. And if we all just started thinking more like that, we all started thinking seven generations down the road, we would forget about these orders of government and we would just say, “You know what? We’re here for the future and how do we make the future better?”

David 30:20

Mayor, that’s brilliantly and perfectly put. Princeton’s in very good hands with you at the helm. I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out of your schedule to speak with us and wish you every success. Thank you so much for being on Cities 1.5.

Spencer Coyne 30:36

Thank you. [music ends]

David 30:38

[slow rhythmic music] This episode of Cities 1.5 is produced by University of Toronto Press, with generous support from C40 Cities. Want more access to current research on how city leaders are approaching climate action? We also publish the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy. Our mission is to publish timely evidence-based research that contributes to the urban climate agenda and supports governmental policy towards an equitable and resilient world. The journal serves as a platform for dynamic content that highlights ambitious near-term climate action, with a particular focus on human-centered solutions to today’s most pressing climate challenges. To read the latest issue, visit jccpe.utpjournals.press or click on our link in the show notes. [music ends]

Claudia Huerta 31:38

[phone rings] [whooshing] Hi, I am Claudia Huerta. I am the senior manager for climate migration diplomacy, and I’m in Amsterdam right now. [phone disconnects]

Giovanni Pagani 31:53

[tone dialling] Hi, I am Giovanni Pagani. Senior Manager for Climate and Migration and I’m calling from Barcelona. [phone disconnects]

Jazmin Burgess 32:02

[tone dialling] Hi, I am Jazmin Burgess. I’m the Director of Inclusive Climate Action and I’m calling from London in the UK. [handset clicks]

David 32:11

I’m delighted that today three experts, C40 colleagues, are joining us for this very important conversation, particularly in view of current political trends that we’re seeing that try to demonize newcomers. So, before we get into the topic, I’ll just ask each of my guests to tell our listeners a little bit more about the work they do at C40 and who they are. Claudia, over to you first.

Claudia Huerta 32:37

Thanks, David. My name is Claudia Huerta. I’m senior manager for climate migration diplomacy at C40, and I work on making sure that our manager’s voices are heard in the diplomatic space on this really important issue.

David 32:49

Great. Well, I look forward to asking some questions about that as well. Giovanni?

Giovanni Pagani 32:54

Hi, I am Giovanni Pagani, Senior Manager for Climate and Migration, and I work on the delivery of our Global Mayors Task Force on this topic, which is focused on raising awareness about the urban dimension of climate migration and accelerating responses through mayoral leadership.

David 33:10

Giovanni, thanks very much. And Jazmin?

Jazmin Burgess 33:12

Yeah. Hi, David. Nice to be back on the podcast. I am Jazmin Burgess. I’m the Director of Inclusive Climate Action at C40. The Inclusive Climate Action Program at C40 helps city center equity inclusion in their climate solutions and we work over a number of different thematic issues. So one of my responsibilities is how our work on climate migration links to the many other climate and equity issues that we are working on and how to draw those links together.

David 33:39

Well, Jazmin, maybe we could start there. You know, we’re all technical experts. Sometimes we fall into jargon. What is climate-driven migration?

Jazmin Burgess 33:49

 Climate-driven migration really predominantly refers to the different drivers of migration that are linked to the climate crisis. So, where people are forced to move from their existing locations as a result of either a climate trigger such as a flood, typhoon, et cetera, or general erosion of changes in livelihoods or a situation that might be underpinned by climate issues. You know, things such as changing food prices or different—loss of jobs, et cetera.

But maybe the other thing I would also just throw in there is, there’s a very strong link between climate and migration more broadly, and there’s also a lot of untapped interesting issues around how the aim to tackle climate action can be complimented by the wider issue of migration. We know that the debate around climate migration has been quite politicized recently, and so there’s a lot of misconceptions at the heart of that. But also a lot of ways that things have been misconstrued to look at, “This as an issue that is just something that everyone should be terrified about,” and not actually around how there are some really interesting dynamics that could help us take more effective climate action and also look at how migration is part of the sort of more inclusive world we want to build.

David 35:06

Do you have any sense of numbers? You know, what are we looking at five years, 10 years, 20 years from now in terms of people on the move because of the climate-related changes?

Jazmin Burgess 35:20

We released a research late last year that said there were 8 million climate migrants predicted to arrive in 10 Global South cities by 2050, so that gives you a sense just in a snapshot of cities. And some of those cities that we looked at included Bogotá, Freetown, Amman, and then also just highlighted the fact that we already know that climate migration is happening already. And so it’s not just something that’s happening in the future, we know that there is some of these trends that we’re seeing now as well.

David 35:46

[slow rhythmic music] Those are huge numbers obviously. And I want to come back to the issue of internal migration versus migration between countries, because I think it’s an important part of this context.

Giovanni, can you talk a bit about climate migrants themselves? Who a typical migrant might be and a typical story for climate migrants?

Giovanni Pagani 36:11

I think it’s important to stress that often in the process of moving climate migrants trade one sets of risk for others. We see vulnerable communities being pushed away from their rural livelihoods moving into cities, but also ending up settling in areas that are inherently prone to climate risks, or working informally in sectors where they are more exposed to hazards like extreme heat and the effects that has had on health. We see it displaying out in a lot of different ways and most of the time simultaneously at the same time and in an overlapping way.

Well, evidence shows, from the research that Jazmin was mentioning earlier and that we developed last year, and also other institutions like the World Bank developed, like, a lot of the climate-driven migration happens internally in short distances and towards cities. Where we see most of the evidence is more of an internal and domestic aspect, but also can have kind of repercussions across borders. But I think it’s important to stress that element. Also, not to fuel misconceptions about mass migrations from Global South to the Global North. This kind of fueling more alarmist narratives.

David 37:21

So, let’s speak to that report, which I understand is called the Future Urban Landscapes report. Claudia, can you highlight some of the main findings of that report and its insights about how cities can not only prepare for climate migration, but also can adapt their infrastructure services and policies to be more resilient and sustainable for everybody?

Claudia Huerta 37:47

So, one is that we’d seen that there’s this growing intensity of climate change and therefore the displacement that the climate change is causing. And we knew that there was lots of data at the national level, but not a lot at the local and the city level. And when most migration is internal, within the borders of its own country, that data is essential to understand where people are moving within those borders. And I think for context, it’s really important to know that over the past decade nearly half of all displacement around the world have been climate-driven. And so even though we keep talking about how big this will be in the future, it’s really important to note that it’s real and it’s happening now already and it has been. We know that the types of climate risks that drive migrants to move are very different than the ones that they experience once they arrive in cities. And what this really means is that when people decide to move as a result of climate, climate change doesn’t disappear when they migrate, it just becomes more urban in nature when they choose to resettle in cities. And so the importance of local climate action is essential to protect people that move, but also the people that obviously are already there without anticipatory action led by cities. Right? The trends that climate migration creates, let’s say, they’re not new, they just accelerate existing trends. And so one of them is urban sprawl. There’s increases in population and there’s growth in informal settlements, but this is all if cities aren’t able to take action, which we know that they already are. Right?

And then the other point that really underscores how important mitigation is that, in all the scenarios that we modeled as emissions increased, the levels of climate migration increased to every city that we studied. This was true for Curitiba, which is a relatively small city in Brazil, all the way up to the Bogotá and the Freetowns, which are large capital cities. And so it really goes to show how important adaptation is, but also mitigation in reducing the amount of displacement that could be created as a result of the climate crisis.

David 39:45

Certainly in the Global North, and I might argue in many, many countries all over the world, there’s a rise in anti-migrant sentiment. We see the political forces, I think you can fairly accurately call the far right, it’s certainly in the Global North countries today. How does that impact the work of city policy makers, the work of C40 and others in the climate-driven migration area?

Jazmin Burgess 40:11

Yeah, you’ve really hit the nail on the head of probably what is the most significant sort of political contextual issue that we’re definitely facing. It definitely in the Global North, but I do think there is some element of that narrative present in a lot of places at the moment. The thing that often is overshadowed by this narrative is that migration has always happened. The issue now with climate change is that climate change is creating increased vulnerability, more migration, and a new challenge to tackle. This issue of this rhetoric is deflecting from the fact that migration is something that is always present in our society and it shouldn’t be sort of just seen as something that’s just suddenly happening. And that, I think is important because it also feeds into how you find the solutions and what are the—what is the way forward.

In terms of sort of the work that—you know, what C40 does and city policy makers, I think we’re very privileged in C40 and a lot of our mayors that we work with had already—have already identified the interrelationship between climate and migration. Have really been at the forefront of being able to think about how you look at these issues and how you confront those issues and how you center those in a political environment, be it the current anti-migrant sentiment, but also a lot of other very relevant trends such as, you know, people’s concern about how climate solutions are equitable.

If I think a bit more about the bigger picture around climate action, we know, for example, that if we are to do all the climate action we need to do in our cities in the world, there is actually a huge skill shortages in the amount of jobs that are needed to deliver some of these things. You can read the news in, a lot of the Global North countries, for example, there’s a real evidence to show that if you move towards heat pumps in your homes, there’s actually a very positive climate benefit. But so many different countries have gaps in skills of being able to have the workforce to be able to equip the population with these heat pumps. But at the same time you have an influx of migration coming in some of these—in these locations, which actually provides an opportunity to think, “How do we tackle all these different issues together and how do we sort of think more constructively around all the different things we need to do to tackle climate change, to create jobs to be able to have more inclusive societies?” And the focus on the anti-immigrant sentiment sort of closes down that conversation to look at how we confront those challenges together. So that is something that we’re trying to work with not only our mayors, but also our numerous partners. Around how do we challenge this narrative and how do we actually demonstrate solutions that counter that narrative?

David 42:41

[fast rhythmic music] The C40 is working with the Mayors Migration Council, in fact, to help set it up. Can you talk a bit about what the Mayors Migration Council is—Giovanni mentioned at the beginning—why it exists and what we’re doing with them?

Jazmin Burgess 42:56

The C40 and Mayors Migration Council task force is the main way that we collaborate with the Mayors Migration Council. And the Mayors Migration Council are very similar to C40 in that they are very focused on migration, whereas we, at C40, are a bit more focused on the climate action side of things. And we decided to join forces to unpick this issue together. And the task force has been a group of leading mayors amongst our shared membership that have really wanted to both be the leading voices within our networks, to be able to show that they’re prioritizing this issue. So we have, for example, the mayor of Freetown, we have the mayor of London, both of whom are our C40 co-chairs, but we also have a number of other mayors, the mayor of DC, the mayor of Milan, who are confronting these challenges. [music ends]

And the task force itself has worked to provide the mayors with a space to share their experiences of climate and migration so they can share what they’re doing locally and share ideas for potential replication, to be able to make a strong political statement from mayors collectively, to be able to influence some of the processes that Claudia and Giovanni mentioned, you know, such as the discussions in the COP, in the global forums that sometimes are talking about climate migration but maybe aren’t recognizing the city perspective of this. And so giving our mayors that place to be able to have a unified perspective or positions they want to raise, and then [helping us 44:16]—helping to facilitate engagement in those processes from the task force.

David 44:20

Sort of like C40 using their actions and their voices to make a real difference as the C40 mayors do on climate. I want to follow up on this concept of the positives. Are there some other examples of positive things that cities led by their mayors are doing to help migrants and also help the cities be better places to live for everybody?

Claudia Huerta 44:47

What we know is that mayors are really leading on this work and making sure that the actions that they take are inclusive and equitable. So we really look at climate migration through kind of three thematic angles. So one is resilience and making sure that you’re integrating migration into your resilience efforts, and so a really good example of this is Freetown. So Freetown launched this initiative called Freetown the Treetown, where their goal is to plant 1 million trees in the city, and that’s part of an effort for them to reduce heat stress for the city and to reduce landslide risk and improve air quality. Through this project, they created more than 600 green jobs that were targeted to marginalized and vulnerable youth, which included migrants within that. And the other angle that we look at this through is urban inclusion. So how do you make sure that migrants are included in general initiatives and that they benefit from this urban society that we know mayors are building.

And so Amman is a really good example of that, where they worked with international donors specifically through an ILO’s LED employment and intensive infrastructure program. Which the name sounds very serious, but the benefit of this is that they made sure that there was employment opportunities within public parks in the city and that 50% were offered to Jordanians and 50% were offered to Syrians who make up the lion’s share of the refugees that live in the city. And so by doing that, the city’s improving their park system, they’re offering opportunities to both locals and to migrants, and we know that the cities benefits from this. And then the third angle is urban transformation, so making sure that you’re leveraging the climate transition to offer opportunities to all. And so Milan is really a leading city on this front, where they did a green jobs equity impact assessment where they determined that between 2021 and 2030 they could support over 50,000 jobs from the Green & Just Recovery, but especially those in construction and manufacturing where a lot of migrants already work. And so by doing this equity assessment, which sounds like a lot of numbers, but the truth of it is that it sets out your—kind of your road plan for where your opportunities are in the future, and that’s really instructed a lot of the city’s planning and development. And so this is just a small sampling. The task force that we work on has a lot of really great publications that have a lot more that we definitely invite people who are interested to refer to. At the C40-MMC task force we have an action agenda where a lot of these are highlighted.

David 47:12

Okay. So, go on the C40 website. A recent report from C40 and the Migration Council really highlighted opportunities that a green and just transition could offer cities and their leaders. Could you talk a bit more about that? Is there anything else coming out of the report that would really give some examples to other cities and leaders and interested members of the public about what can be done?

Giovanni Pagani 47:39

Yeah, sure. Something that we have realized since we started working our task force is that there is a growing understanding of the impacts that climate change has on human mobility. And this is absolutely positive and needed, but at the same time there is maybe less evidence and understanding of how human mobility can positively interact with what our cities are doing on green transition and job creation and economic inclusion. And this is something that our [taskforce 48:06] mayors have always done very clear since the release and development of that action agenda that Claudia was mentioning earlier. So last year we had the opportunity to partner with the Climate Migration Council and the Mayors Migration Council to really define what are the challenges and opportunities that cities have in this space and what is the policy evidence about that. And I think we collected over 30 examples of existing city-led actions that we saw across regions and across our membership, and most importantly across cities and countries of origin, transit and destination for migration.

So, for example, we see how cities are using their investments in green jobs creation to also create opportunities for migrants and refugees economic inclusion. Claudia was mentioning in the case of Amman earlier. In the case of Freetown, for instance, we see how international development funding was leveraged to create job opportunities in the waste management sector for rural migrants and youth coming from other regions of Sierra Leone. More on the supply side, we see how cities are really leading the way in skills, workforce development, training, upskilling and tackling also some of the barriers that migrants, asylum seekers and refugees often face in accessing this program. So, London has done a lot of work, for instance, in that respect in kind of preparing the green workforce needed.

David 49:32

Can you just speak to the kind of barriers that people have that are identified by the report and what London’s doing to help people overcome them? Is it foreign qualifications or is it practical things?

Giovanni Pagani 49:46

It can range, really, from access to housing and public transport, where we see kind of a lot of cities taking proactive actions in making that more accessible and affordable. And in the case of London, it was more kind of addressing barriers that asylum seeker or refugees had in accessing adult education programs. So [inaudible 50:02] investment in skills and training that is also including programs that are specifically related to sectors like construction that are critical for creation of jobs in the green economy. So, I think it’s really diverse. But what I found interesting is really seeing that in many of these barriers, municipal actors have a big role that they can play to tackling them.

David 50:29

[slow rhytmic music] In many places there’s very negative narrative. Might not be the dominant one always, but it is in some, about migration period let alone climate-driven migration. If you’ve been able to think about how do we shift that narrative away from that real negativity towards brave people who are voyaging thousands of miles in some cases, certainly hundreds, to find a new place to live for them and their families, how do we shift that?

Jazmin Burgess 51:00

The rhetoric around—negative rhetoric around migration is obviously a distraction from some of the bigger issues around inequality and equity that the world is facing at the moment. But there is a wider issue around ensuring that people in the world—every people, migrant or not migrant, has a—you know, a better life, there is access to services. People are seeing their cost of living being affected, and that isn’t to do with migration, it’s to do with a general issue around inequality and some of the pressures people are facing on their day-to-day lives. That element of that rhetoric around migration is such a hindrance to us being able to actually have a better approach to improving everyone’s lives. I’ve seen in some of the—in Europe some of the press around [that 51:48] there’s a big attention being placed on the lack of adequate and affordable housing for populations in Europe. And then there’s been some negative [connotations 51:58] that that’s around migration when, actually, the reality is around the fact that there isn’t enough houses being built and there isn’t enough different elements of, you know, be it rent control, be it affordable access to rent for everyone. [music ends]

So, I would say the first thing around changing this narrative is realizing that we are all sort of in this together and it doesn’t help by only focusing on one group. We talked about the numbers and we talked about the different data that’s going to be faced by cities around climate migration, but there is also a very human element to this side of things. And sometimes when we only think about the numbers, we lose the human side of what migration means. And with the people who are migrating [what 52:37] we always say about inclusive approaches to climate action is that you have to have the perspectives of people who have the experience and have the expertise. And very much when you are having a migration to a city or a new location, you are gaining new skills and expertise. And how can we tell that story a bit more and less around the fearmongering that comes with it, and how does those—the people and—the humans who are moving bring something that help us sort of build a more positive society.

David 53:06

You’ve given some really good examples of excellent work happening, and it’s been interesting and, I think, a little bit heartening. What opportunities do you see for progress in the coming years in terms of policy shifts, perhaps funding, particularly in the Global South?

Claudia Huerta 53:22

One of the really big things that we’re keeping an eye on for COP30 is the official launch of the fund for responding to loss and damage, which is dedicated only for Global South and developing countries to address loss and damage in their own countries through programming that the countries themselves, in theory, in partnership with local governments decide that they want to implement. And so what it means is that ideally that funding will be available right after COP30 for countries to use for climate migration. And so it’s really a first of its kind. There’s no other fund that’s like this for climate impacts. It’s really—I think beyond the promise of the fund itself, which has a capitalization, I think, right now of 700 million that they’re trying to mobilize by next year. But it sets an example of what climate finance can do for the larger international climate finance infrastructure.

And part of what we’re pushing for and what cities worldwide are pushing for is to make sure that local governments can access some of that funding directly and that they’re able to implement it for the initiatives that they know that they need. And when we talk about climate migration, we know how inherently urban it is, and so it’s really important for us that that fund has that window of access.

[whimsical music] And so we’re hoping that by COP30 there’ll be an access modality in there for local governments to use the fund and that it really sets the tone moving forward for how climate migration can be dealt with from a finance perspective, let’s say.

David 54:45

It’s pretty clear that if that sort of funding only goes to national governments it’s—the world is missing a necessity, really, not just an opportunity. This has been an incredibly uplifting conversation for me. Some very ill-motivated people point to migrants as scapegoats and the depth of the issue, and the fact that a huge proportion of climate migrants are actually migrating within countries often gets obscured. Wish you all continued success with your ongoing work. It’s essential, it’s moral and it’s extremely important, so thanks for taking time out of your day jobs to be here with us on Cities 1.5.

Claudia Huerta 55:25

Thank you.

Giovanni Pagani 55:25

Thank you.

Jazmin Burgess 55:26

Thanks, David. [music continues then ends]

David 55:30

[Cities 1.5 theme music] Migration is yet another consequence of the planetary crisis we’ve created for ourselves. It’s a new reality for all of us, not just people on faraway islands. It is vital that both cities and the people who live in them prepare for an increase in climate-related weather disasters, like flooding, fires, and extreme heat…and that even if their city is lucky enough to avoid these consequences, they’re prepared to aid newcomers who have had the bad luck of being displaced. It’s also critical to understand that despite what the current political and media landscape surrounding the issue is telling us, there are potential benefits and opportunities which spring from climate-driven migration. And it’s up to us to make the most of them.

On the next episode of Cities 1.5, we’ll discover how two very different cities are tackling the issue of resilience in the era of the climate crisis. Mayor Moedas of Lisbon will be taking us through what he and the city are doing to protect against flooding. We’ll also be hearing from Kathy Baughman McLeod, the CEO of Climate Resilience for All, who contributed an article for the upcoming public health issue of the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy. She’ll be telling us more about a unique heat insurance initiative that aims to protect vulnerable women when extreme heat hits the Indian city of Ahmedabad. You won’t want to miss it. 

This has been Cities 1.5, leading global change through local climate action. I’m David Miller. I was the mayor of Toronto, Canada, and I know firsthand the role cities can play in solving the climate crisis. Currently, I’m the editor-in-chief of the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, published by the University of Toronto Press in collaboration with the C40 Center for City Climate Policy and Economy, where I’m also the managing director. C40’s mission is to help its member cities halve their emissions within a decade while improving equity, building resilience, and creating the conditions for everyone everywhere to thrive.

Cities 1.5 is produced by University of Toronto Press in association with the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy and C40 Cities. This podcast is produced by Jessica Schmidt and edited by Morgane Chambrin. Our executive producers are Peggy Whitfield and Calli Eliopoulos. Our music is by Lorna Gilfedder. The fight for an empowered world is closer than you think. To learn more, visit the show’s website linked in the episode notes. See you next time. [Cities 1.5 theme music continues then ends].