Climate change is not the cause, migration not the problem

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Climate change is a problem of unimaginable scope and magnitude – in cause, implication and responsibility. However, a focus on climate hazards can exclude the multiple other causes of, and thus responsibilities for, crises that follow climate or climate-change events. Professor at the American University in Washington, Jesse Ribot, suggests that we need to rethink our understanding as to the role climate change plays in migration, and, importantly, does not play. The choice of analytical frame for explaining migration, or any other climate-associated crisis, is normative and matters. 

With Ribot’s current research on social and political causes of precarity and social suffering in natural resource dependent communities, as well as on the basis of his field studies mainly taking place in the West African Sahel, he will provide an insight into the multiple causes producing precarity and shaping migration in Senegal at this seminar.

Speakers
Jesse Ribot, professor, School of International Service at American University, Washington DC
Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, senior researcher, DIIS
Lily Salloum Lindegaard, researcher, DIIS
Neil Webster, senior researcher, DIIS

Programme

• On the need to challenge simple causal explanations linking climate change to migration, Neil Webster
• Cause and responsibility: Migration from Senegal toward Europe, Jesse Ribot
• Brief comment from a migration researcher, Ninna Nyberg Sørensen
• Brief comment from a climate change researcher, Lily Salloum Lindegaard
• Q&A and reflections, moderated by Neil Webster
   

Recorded on Wednesday 1 June 2022, 10.00-12.00, DIIS ∙ Danish Institute for International Studies, Auditorium