– economic motives, or monetary gains accruing to migrants, by moving from their place of origin to their final destination;

– political motives, associated with situations linked to conflict, security, discrimination and persecution in the migrant’s place of origin;

– demographic motives, associated with population expansion as well as diseases that affect the morbidity and mortality rate in the migrant’s place of origin;

– social motives, associated with family reunification and the pursuit of better education for themselves and the members of the migrant’s family;

– environmental motives, associated with human or natural disasters in the migrant’s place of origin.

Therefore, it seems important to highlight another major issue concerning the environmental theme and its myths. In particular, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [United Nations, n.a., art. 2] defines climate change as «a change in climate due to direct or indirect human activity that alters the global atmosphere along with natural variation in climate». The emphasis is on increased emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that subsequently alter the atmosphere’s radiative properties, resulting in warming of the climate system [IPCC 2021] [4] . Hence climate change refers specifically to the rise in global temperatures. Throughout history, climate has continually changed, but this change occurred naturally and at a slower pace [Venditto 2021]. What we are currently observing is an era of anthropogenic climate change.

This is corroborated by research [NASA n.a.] which indicates that the changes are occurring at a much faster rate as a result of human activity, like burning fossil fuels such as natural gas, oil and coal. NASA’s analysis revealed that the decade 2010-20 was the hottest since records began in 1880, with 2020 the hottest year ever recorded, and that ocean temperatures were the highest they have ever been [NASA n.a.].

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions are known to be the main sources of this global warming. Indeed, ¶{p. 273}there is a broad consensus among scientists and scholars that human activities are causing the environment to change rapidly for the worse [Hausfather 2017; Abhinav, Arjun and Simi 2020; [National Academies 2020].

At the same time, over the last decade, scholars and policy makers have started to pay more attention to the impact of climate change on human mobility [Traore and Ionesco 2018; Šedová, ¥izmaziová and Cook 2021]. The 2010 Cancun Adaptation Framework is the first major climate policy document which refers to human mobility associated to climate change-induced displacement, human mobility and planned relocation [Warner 2021]. However, depending on the economic and socio-political conditions in the respective regions of origin, the connection between climate change and mobility is not always very well expounded.

The climate change-human mobility nexus is generally presented using sensational and alarming predictions, promoting fear-based stories of waves of climate migrants forced to move from their place of residence [Myers 2002; Henley 2020] ultimately landing in Europe and North America [Lustgarten 2020]. These predictions, although well intentioned and aimed at educating about the impact of climate change and promoting structural and humanitarian interventions, may have the opposite result in terms of unintended effects, especially in Europe, and elsewhere where nationalist/populist movements have been emerging very strongly, and where the fear of environmentally induced mobility is used to promote restrictive migration policies or boost parties’ political agenda [Trilling 2020].

Furthermore, as indicated by several authors [McAuliff and Triandafyllidou 2021; Cattaneo and Peri 2016; Kleemans 2015], mobility in the event of an adverse climatic occurrence depends on the personal wealth of the affected individuals. For this very same reason, while acknowledging that climate change exists, it is hard to predict the size of the migration movement it can generate. What is clear is that environmentally induced migration, particularly sudden-onset events [Alarina 2018], generally echoes the same pattern of all other forms of migration. Such displacement is mostly internal or follows a regional/continental route. Moreover, rarely do environmental migrants move large distances/intra-continentally. This observation is reinforced by Cattaneo ¶{p. 274}and Peri’s observation that environmentally induced movements depend on the initial level of income of the affected individuals. Although movements are hard to predict, one trend is however apparent: people do move to urban areas. In 2020 at least 2.59 billion people lived in metropolises with more than 300,000 inhabitants representing approximately 60 per cent of the world’s urban population. Urbanization has been most pronounced in those countries below the Brandt line (fig. 1) [5] , especially in Asia and Oceania, which saw the urbanization rate increase from 43.1 in 2010 to 49.8 per cent in 2020 [UNDESA 2019; UNCTAD 2021].

According to the various, more or less pessimistic, scenarios proposed, global warming has had and will continue to have a serious impact on the livelihoods of those based in Mediterranean countries, particularly in the West Asia and Nord African (WANA) region, potentially intensifying already substantial human mobility.

However, as already indicated when describing the different motives leading to migratory movements and the way in which there are entangled, it is not easy to pinpoint the specific contribution that environmental/climate changes will have on migration. What makes it more difficult is the fact that, at present, there is no single definition of environmental/climate migrants commonly accepted at international level. This means that quantification differs according to the definition adopted. Of course, the broader, but also less accurate and verifiable, the definition, the larger is the number of migrants that can be associated with the status of environmental/climate migrants [Caruso and Venditto 2011]. In the absence of an unambiguous definition, following the general view among academics/scholars of the discipline, consensus is often achieved on the use of the broadest notion of induced/forced migration, where the main elements are the motivations that «force» people to move, and not national boundaries. A variety of socio-economic factors, which result in a state of necessity that forces mobility, are considered the reasons that lead to such movement, together with significant environmental degradation factors. ¶{p. 275}

In this perspective, the definition of forced migration used here includes the following categories:

– migrants and IDPs, obliged to leave due to a fast-changing habitat, climate change or environmental disasters caused either by natural disasters or by human actions;

– migrants and IDPs, displaced as a result of the implementation of economic development programmes, such as the construction of major infrastructure projects, exploitation of mineral resources and deforestation;

– political refugees, asylum seekers, subject to displacement due to conflicts, civil wars, persecutions [Caruso and Venditto 2012].

This definition is in line with that used by the IOM which describes environmental/climate migrants as:

The development and implementation of policies to reduce people’s exposure to environmental/climate shocks while stimulating economic growth and reducing the risk of political instability will prevent the likelihood of further migration movements.

Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the nature and extent of migration strongly depend not only on the factors that cause displacements but are also influenced by the migration policies that are implemented by both the countries of origin and destination.