Converging Crises. A Qualitative Analysis of Online Representations and Narratives of Climate Migration

The ongoing climate crisis can be one of the various interrelated factors determining migration, and it is believed to increasingly and substantially contribute to and reshape future migration patterns. The acknowledgement that the climate crisis plays an increasingly significant role in human mobility and displacement may at least partly diverge from assumptions, widespread especially in Western/global North host societies, about why people migrate. The main aim of this paper is to situate climate-related migration with respect to assumptions about legitimate migration made in receiving societies, suggesting that normalising the climate crisis as a factor contributing to human migration flows within public debates on migration may challenge these assumptions. Focusing on perspectives from both prospective and actual climate migrants, this paper features a qualitative study, based on framing and Appraisal theory. It focuses on a set of informative and narrative texts drawn from websites whose aim is to raise awareness about migration phenomena related to the climate crisis, by making involved people’s voices heard. Overall, results suggest that although the analysed texts largely focus on forced migration and the suffering of migrants – generally contributing to perceived legitimacy in host societies – the representations of climate-related migration that emerge from them largely diverge from the ‘good, legitimate migrant’ stereotypes identified in previous studies.