Breaking the 4th wall of climate migration

Developing policy and education capacity of local climate justice organizations in Somalia and Kenya

Contrary to what is often conveyed in public discourse, climate migration is more than coastal communities being displaced by rising sea levels; climate change is a threat multiplier that exacerbates structural and social injustices, causing people to leave their homelands because their environment has increasingly become a factor in their struggle for survival.

Through a multimedia narrative construction exercise, this project seeks to create lessons on community-collaboration methodologies and direct communication with partnered NGOs working on refugee issues, a learning approach focused upon changing the discourse around climate migration that targets both communities in selected ODA states – Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia – and secondary students in Scotland. Our team, composed of journalists, academics, and community leaders has gathered multimedia materials (photos, video, audio) that shine a light on the experiences facing the Anuak in Ethiopia in their situation as refugees, and upon communities in Somaliland, a region hit by unprecedented droughts, where to date more than 1.5 million are internally displaced. Through our work, we aim to understand the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors of human migration, with a specific focus on climate change as a ‘threat multiplier, to connect theories of migration to the lived experiences of those outlining their narratives, and to consider how experiences of migration are linked to wider experiences of injustice.