Migrant Labour-Knowledge at the Centre of Climate Change Adaptation

Khalil rakes the lawn of a farm in Limousin, central France. He chats to Tarik, who has come from Paris with other members of Association d’Accueil en Agriculture et Artisanat (Association A4), trying to establish a dialogue with farmers in the area.¹ It is February 2022 and the association is getting off the ground. They have come to discuss with farmers how to create links between French peasants and migrants who live in urban centres and predominantly work in construction and hospitality. Their goal is not only for migrants to provide dignified labour conditions for themselves, it is also to train members in farming and provide them with access to and ownership of land.

• Khalil: But I was often at the village. But before it was … well … We had palm trees, we had vegetables and all those things.

• Tarik: Dates?

• K: Yeah. But then, everything was dead. There is no water, it’s not raining.

• T: Ah, that is why you left?

• K: Yeah. Almost everybody left the village.

• T: Because of the drought?

• K: Yeah. There is no water. All the palm trees; it’s dead. And to have water to drink, it’s very, very expensive.

In Khalil’s words we hear a common story; when drought and water scarcity made life in the village untenable, he decided to migrate.² His testimony serves not only to narrate a common starting point for migration journeys, but also to explain how racism has produced bad science in the West and how today’s climate science is no different. Since global environmental governance consolidated in the 1980s and ‘90s, Western climate science has often alluded to two intertwining ideas when investigating the relationship between the environment and migration: the global water crisis and environmental refugees.³ These ideas have a long history. Hydrology carries with it a strong bias towards temperate and humid climates, such as those of France and England, where it was first established as a scientific discipline.⁴ Migration studies inherited concepts such as primitive migration from early geographers the likes of Friedrich Ratzel, fusing a strong environmental determinism with the racism of nineteenth-century Europe.⁵ Migrants coming from arid lands have flooded the imagination of Western politics and academia for decades.

Particularly in the European Union, scientific research into water scarcity relates directly to an anti-migratory policy which frames migrants coming from, and through, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as a security concern.⁶ Precisely in an ageing and warming Europe, undoing this association remains a necessary step for successful adaptation to climate change. Migrants’ knowledge of water management and their collective struggles around agricultural labour should be a driving force of Europe’s adaptation.

Bad Waters and the Global Water Crisis

In What is Water? geographer Jamie Linton traces the history of an idea, which he calls modern water,⁷ a particular understanding which appeared with Western Modernity and still colours our way of looking at it. The main characteristic of this Modern perspective is to depict water as an abstract resource; H2O is mere substance, devoid of any social and historical context.⁸ Linton relates the origins of this idea, but also its success in becoming common sense, appearing as the only legitimate (scientific) understanding of water. However, the abstraction of water as a resource entails its quantification; inevitably, water scarcity appears as the flipside of modern water. 

Global water governance has been dominated by the idea of a global water crisis since the 1990s.​​ The story goes as follows: available, clean freshwater is only a fraction of the total water on our planet; with the global population increasing and climate change worsening living conditions, droughts will lead to hunger, migration, and conflict. Seen through the lens of Linton’s work, the global water crisis is revealed as a crisis of modern water. Recurring shortage crises are inherent to the Malthusian paradigm of modern water, in which resources are pitted against a growing population.⁹ In other words, the global water crisis also has a history. It is possible to narrate the series of water shortage crises that preceded it and to trace how at each crossroads a false resolution was found, simply delaying the underlying contradiction. Unfolding this sequence of failed resolutions helps explain why many of the highest-ranking “global water experts” have turned to racist alarmism.

During the 1960s, the United States endured a series of droughts and water shortages, even after decades of heavy investments in hydraulic infrastructure aimed at ensuring a stable water supply. President Lyndon Johnson addressed the delegates of the first International Symposium on Water Desalination, assembled in the East Room at the White House: the US “will join in a massive cooperative international effort to find solutions for man’s water problems.”¹⁰ A temporary exit to the crisis was found by expanding water supply even further, for example, by pumping 200 million US dollars into research and development to lower the cost of desalting water.¹¹ However, supply-side water management would encounter a new limit in the 1990s. By then, this approach had globalised, and the new shortage crisis took on a new dimension.

In 1993, American hydrologist Peter Gleick published Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources.¹² Supply-side water management had run its course, and scarcity now took on a global dimension. A new solution would have to be found. The Dublin-Rio Principles for water management, adopted a year earlier at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro,¹³ found the answer in the economic dogma of the time: “water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognised as an economic good.”¹⁴ A shift took place, from water as a resource to water as a commodity. Demand-side management was prescribed for the ails of this dwindling resource. However, it represents yet another false resolution to the water shortage crisis. It compounds the problem of an ever-growing population with the consumerist problem of an ever-growing consumption per capita.¹⁵ 

In order to find a real resolution to the global water crisis, a conceptual leap is necessary. Water policy must abandon the three abstractions underpinning it: modern water, Malthusian population, and market consumerism. However, these dogmas have proven too strong for most global water experts to question. Forced to find a solution to this riddle, the orthodoxy of global water management has turned to Malthusian population control as a knee-jerk reflex: “The world’s population cannot continue to grow indefinitely. It must be stabilized as quickly as possible … the problem of population must be tackled directly.”¹⁶

In its contemporary guise, Malthusian contempt portrays the poor and the racialised as unsustainable, bad water managers. Little does it matter, as Patricia Saunders reminds us, that there is a growing body of research which “questions much of the environmentalists’ construction of soil erosion, deforestation, […] overgrazing [and] desertification.”¹⁷ Western water policy is blind to such science while simultaneously ignoring the catastrophic consequences of agro-capital, which is addicted to monoculture and fossil fuels, sterilises the soil, and exhausts groundwater supplies.¹⁸ In the words of Khalil, “everything [is] dead. There is no water.” 

Particularly in Europe, drought has historically been at the forefront of discussions on migration and its relation to the environment. In its contemporary form, these debates are articulated around the notions of the global water crisis and environmental refugees. UN-Water expert Janos Bogardi and Koko Warner, director at the International Organisation for Migration, penned Here Comes the Flood in 2008: “Consider, as an example, that up to 120,000 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa enter northern Africa every year. Some seek a better life there, while tens of thousands attempt to cross the Mediterranean. Their destination is Europe.”¹⁹ Out of arid lands emerges a racialised mass ready to submerge the West; “here comes the flood.”

Bad Science and Environmental Refugees

The intelligentsia of global climate governance is alarmed, its racism unchecked. “Two leviathans are about to collide on the world stage of science and politics—climate change and migration.”²⁰ This neo-environmental determinism presents migration as “proof of the necessity to act against climate change” because it sees migration itself as a catastrophe.²¹ Much of the research behind these alarmist claims has been carried out within the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as well as the UN University, Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), of which Bogardi was a founding director.²² However, Bogardi and Warner explain, Europe is “spearheading [research into] the interactions between climate change and migration,” with political interest in such research “also growing, partly owing to Europe’s proximity to Africa and migration pressures topping the political agenda.”²³

In view of this anti-migrant agenda, the developmental programmes of the EU and its “water diplomacy” take on a different meaning. Much of the research has, indeed, taken place under the auspices of NATO’s Science for Peace and Security programme and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).²⁴ The prominence of the MENA region in this research is not exclusively related to its aridity. European “water diplomacy” inherits “existing security discourses [about the region], such as those on political Islam and terrorism.”²⁵ For the European Union, sustainable water in the Middle East and North Africa is also an anti-migration policy, a matter of security.

This crude anti-migrant policy has, of course, been amply criticised, as has the bad science supporting it: “If one accepts the argument that desertification itself is largely a myth, then it is not perhaps too great a step to suggest that desertification-induced migration is a myth too.”²⁶ A liberal critique, formulated from within the institutionality of climate governance, focuses on two aspects. Firstly, to abandon environmental determinism, more and better research into the migration-environment nexus is necessary. Secondly, “migration should not be seen as a tragedy in itself but that, on the contrary, it can form part of a proactive adaptation strategy that should be encouraged.”²⁷ This position, which has established itself as a sort of new, complementary orthodoxy, is perfectly illustrated by fellow members of the Hugo Observatory for Migration, Environment and Politics, Julia Blocher and François Gemenne. Blocher holds a position at the UN University, and Gemenne, among other things, has co-authored the 6th impact assessment report of the IPCC. In How can migration serve adaptation to climate change? they “begin to address managed migration as a tool for climate change adaptation and […] a positive exercise,” which should be studied “from three main vantage points: the migrants themselves, the community of origin, and the community of destination.”²⁸ Romain Felli, whose texts often dissect the liberal policies of green capitalism, warns against this stance in La grande adaptation:

The encouragement of migration as an adaptation strategy takes its place within the context of an international-level “migration management” system which the IOM is trying to put in place. […] Freedom of movement is thus defended less as a fundamental human right and more insistently as a spur to growth. In this portrayal, international migration represents a “triple win” – for the arrival country, whose workforce will grow; for the departure country, which migrants will regularly send remittances back to; and for the migrants themselves, who will see their living standards improve.²⁹

If migration policy in the West is “caught between the two apparently opposed – but in reality complementary – poles of securitarian nationalism […] and economic neoliberalism,” so is the scientific officialism that investigates the links between migration and climate change.³⁰ Environmental determinism should be abandoned entirely. This includes its more refined version, which produces multi-causal models, only to isolate the environmental factor. Most research today is mediated by agent-based models, which alternate between two levels of analysis: either the individual or household, or aggregated totals. The unnamed in-between is, of course, the societal level, inconveniently saturated with the history of colonial and imperial extraction. A first step towards shedding the implicit racism of Western migration studies would be to fill this void and include sociopolitical analysis explicitly by connecting migration studies with decolonial ecology. This discipline is not only adequately equipped to accord race and coloniality the centrality that they have in regard to migration, but also to highlight the extent to which racial power plays into climate change politics; even how “the sociological discourse of climate change itself becomes a key site through which the category of race is written anew.”³¹

Migrant Workers' Knowledge

Another necessary step away from bad science is to reframe the discussion. Research should focus not on migration as an adaptation strategy for those fleeing drought or rising seas, but on migrants’ political agency and the value of their knowledge for shaping a desirable adaptation to climate change. Decolonial ecology, which encourages us to think through ecological issues from these places at the forefront of the climate crisis, presents a useful framework, re-linking questions of race, coloniality, labour knowledge and land ownership. In Europe, research into migration and adaptation to climate change should start by addressing the agro-industry. Agriculture is responsible for approximately 60 percent of freshwater use in a region which is warming and drying.³² Agriculture is also a major sector for migrant employment, particularly of the most vulnerable type: seasonal employment for non-regularised migrants.

Migrant labour and knowledge should be a central concern of analyses and mobilisations against agro-industry, not least because of the need for analytical precision: “The world food system is usually discussed as if the only actors were ‘farmers’ (or sometimes ‘peasants’).” Unionist Peter Rossman explains how these categories “obscure more than they enlighten: [m]any farmers are dependent on waged labour for survival, and farmers come in all sizes.”³³ The true effects of the policies of “managed migration” promoted by the IOM and UNEP are revealed when looking at the agro-industry from the perspective of migrant workers. In La grande adaptation, Felli describes how the creation of a reserve army of migrant agricultural workers is an adaptation strategy of agricultural capital. In this way, agro-capital can offload the reduction of profit rates caused by climate change onto this vulnerable task force. This is particularly true for seasonal, cross-border migrant workers. Agro-capital, Felli explains, uses seasonal migration to externalise the costs of social reproduction to migrant workers’ countries of origin, particularly their women. The legal frameworks of “managed seasonal migration,” such as the European Seasonal Workers Directive, are a key instrument in producing the conditions for agro-capital to operate in such a way.³⁴

A common talking point, and liberal argument in favour of migration, is its potential for generational replacement. In an ageing European countryside, younger migrants are needed for the back-breaking labour in farms. Even if this demographic argument is true, it overlooks, once again, the crucial aspects of knowledge and land ownership. First, it is necessary to consider and value the epistemological dimension of migrant labour. European urbanisation has produced a very rapid loss of agricultural knowledge. However, like Khalil, most migrant workers coming to Europe lived in rural areas before and know how to tend the land. Further, if Europe is warming and drying up, migrant workers and their knowledge of managing water and farming in arid land should be central to Europe’s adaptation strategy: “these people [migrants] are best placed to implement techniques that are better suited to drought and high temperatures.”³⁵ For instance, A4 is testing out certain pulse and cereal varieties from southern latitudes: peanut, pineapple, sorghum, and millet.³⁶ Another problem with the demographic argument is that (once again) it does not concern itself with the sociopolitical conditions under which the generational replacement takes place. “In ten years, 55 percent of agricultural workers will retire, leaving millions of hectares vacant,” A4 explain in Ancrage dans la terre et liberté de circuler (Rooting and Freedom to Move). This opens two scenarios: “either there is a social movement of land re-appropriation against agro-capital, or the latter will impose itself, hoarding land and destroying soils and workers.”³⁷

Industrial agriculture, whose monocultures demand gargantuan amounts of pesticides and water, contaminating and emitting untenable greenhouse gases in the process, is also behind the land squeeze, putting further pressure on agricultural workers to migrate.³⁸ Thus agricultural and migrant struggles are as important to sustainable water practices as is polyculture. In other words, the same socioecologic dynamics that degrade agrarian ecosystems are the ones behind the rent and land squeezes against small farms. The common roots of social and ecological degradation allow for a shared agenda between agricultural, migrant and ecological struggles.³⁹ Such struggles appear in this light as veritable vectors for social adaptation to climate change. “The most fundamental demands of agricultural workers – for a living wage, for collective bargaining rights, for a safe living and working environment — already take us in the direction of sustainable agriculture – ‘green jobs.’”⁴⁰

Scientific research into climate change adaptation should thus move away from migration as a coping strategy. Instead, it should address agricultural and migrant struggles against agro-capital, according a central importance to the issues of knowledge and land property. Shedding the racist and Malthusian contempt for migration that permeates global environmental policy and science is a necessary step for successful adaptation. Implied by this argument, therefore, is the idea that adaptation to climate change is a practice that is politically open, and that the position from which it is addressed and the orientation of knowledge associated with this position matter in determining the political and social outcomes of adaptation. The work of A4 is also a reminder of the obligation facing climate science: to valorise and integrate implicit and practical knowledge, such as that associated with rural labour, that is not sanctioned by global climate policy today.

After Khalil and Tarik’s conversation, once the workday is over and it gets cold outside, everyone gathers around the table. Members of A4 exchange with the farmers they are visiting and reflect on the association and its goals.

Backo: I was a little bit afraid that in ten, fifteen or twenty years, we will not have lands anymore. We, Malians, will not have lands anymore. Because we’re leaving our country en masse, and the Indian, the Chinese [agro-industries] are buying lands everywhere; three thousand hectares, five thousand hectares. They buy, year after year. And we are here. (Sigh). We waste our entire life here, and we go back in a coffin, without money. x[A4] is not just an association. For me, it’s a struggle. To train here and go recover what belongs to us. So, on the one hand, here, it’s an association, but on the other side, it’s a struggle. I never talked about it with Tarik. It was a secret, but he pushed me to say it today.⁴¹

Footnotes

1. Association A4, “D’égal à égal,” (video), Vimeo (uploaded November 13, 2022), https://vimeo.com/770515263. ↑

2. Drought, in contrast to scarcity, refers to a natural lack of water due to a prolonged dry period resulting in water shortage, while scarcity alludes to a structural inaccessibility of water caused by an inadequate supply or insufficient access provided by infrastructures or institutions. ↑

3. Peter H. Gleick et al., Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Essam El-Hinnawi, Environmental Refugees, Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme, 1985. ↑

4. Jamie Linton, What Is Water?: The History of a Modern Abstraction, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010, p. 106. ↑

5. Etienne Piguet, “From ‘Primitive Migration’ to ‘Climate Refugees’: The Curious Fate of the Natural Environment in Migration Studies,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 103, no. 1 (2012): pp. 148–162. Ratzel was the first of a line of German thinkers which integrated geography and social theory with Darwinism. Famously, he coined the term Lebensraum, which would later be adopted by Karl Haushofer, a major influence for Nazi Geopolitik. ↑

6. Delf Rothe, Securitizing Global Warming: A Climate of Complexity, London: Routledge, 2016, p. 96. ↑

7. Linton, What Is Water? ↑

8. Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of “Stuff,” London: Marion Boyars, 1986. ↑

9. Thomas R. Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population has influenced discussions around resource management ever since its publication in 1798. In its simplest terms, in Malthus’ paradigm, population growth outpaces production, leading to inevitable cycles of abundance and shortages. Among the many criticisms of Malthusianism, Deborah Valenze’s is particularly relevant to this discussion. On the one hand, because she highlights its racist and classist biases. On the other, for the importance that she grants to the temporal dimension of Malthusian contempt, whereby the poor and racialised are portrayed as incapable of being rational and future-oriented. Ecological neo-Malthusians, who inherit this view, describe a vicious cycle between “poverty traps” and un-sustainability. Deborah M. Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. ↑

10. United States Interdepartmental Committee on Water for Peace, Water for Peace: A Report of Background Considerations and Recommendations of the Water for Peace Program, Washington, 1967, p. 71. ↑

11. Ibid. ↑

12. Gleick et al., Water in Crisis. ↑

13. The Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development was agreed upon at the International Conference on Water and the Environment (ICWE) in 1992, and submitted later that year to the UNCED in Rio de Janeiro, also known as the Earth Summit. They are known as the Dublin-Rio Principles, and represent a major shift in water management policy. ↑

14. International Conference on Water and the Environment, The Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development, United Nations, 1992. ↑

15. For an analogous critique of the application of marginal economic theory to ecological matters, in which it is absolute, rather than relative, values which count, see Jean Baptiste-Fressoz, More and More and More. An All-Consuming History of Energy, New York: Harper, 2025. For a critique of demand-side water policy, and the discrimination it creates across class and race, see: Sofie Hellberg, The Biopolitics of Water, London: Routledge, 2018. ↑

16. Gleick et al., Water in Crisis, p. 106. ↑

17. Patricia L. Saunders, “Environmental Refugees,” in Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power, ed. Philip Stott and Sian Sullivan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 237. ↑

18. Peter Rossman, “Food Workers’ Rights as a Path to a Low Carbon Agriculture,” in Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment, ed. Nora Räthzel, David Uzzell, London: Routledge, 2012, pp. 58–60. ↑

19. Janos Bogardi and Koko Warner, “Here Comes the Flood,” in Nature Reports Climate Change, 2009. ↑

20. Ibid. ↑

21. Piguet, “From ‘Primitive Migration’ to ‘Climate Refugees,’” p. 155. ↑

22. Saunders, “Environmental Refugees,” pp. 235–36; Rothe, Securitizing Global Warming, p. 96. ↑

23. Janos Bogardi, and Warner Koko,“Here Comes the Flood,” Nature Reports Climate Change 3 (January 2009). They are referring to EACH-FOR, a project in which Warner worked as a researcher. European Commission and FP6, Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios (EACH-FOR). ↑

24. Hans Brauch and Robertson, Security and Environment in the Mediterranean, Berlin: Springer, 2003; Rubio and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Water Scarcity, Land Degradation and Desertification in the Mediterranean Region, Berlin: Springer, 2009; Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Environment and Security Initiative—Madrid Ministerial Declaration on Environment and Security, OSCE, 2007. ↑

25. Rothe, Securitizing Global Warming, p. 96. ↑

26. Richard Black, Refugees, Environment and Development, London: Longman, 1998, p. 26. Cited in Saunders, Environmental Refugees, p. 238. ↑

27. Piguet, From ‘Primitive Migration’ to ‘Climate Refugees’, p. 155. ↑

28. Julia Blocher and François Gemenne, “How Can Migration Serve Adaptation to Climate Change?,” The Geographical Journal, vol. 183 no. 4, 2017: pp. 1–2. Emphasis added. ↑

29. Romain Felli and David Broder, The Great Adaptation: Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe. London: Verso, 2021, Ch. 4. ↑

30. Ibid. ↑

31. Andrew Baldwin, “Racialisation and the Figure of the Climate-Change Migrant,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space vol. 45, no. 6 (2013): p. 1487. ↑

32. European Environment Agency, “Water Scarcity Conditions in Europe,” European Environment Agency (an official website of the European Union), EEA Indicator Assessment, November 28, 2025, https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/use-of-freshwater-resources-in-europe-1. ↑

33. Peter Rossman, “Food Workers’ Rights as a Path to a Low Carbon Agriculture,” in Trade Unions in the Green Economy, ed. Norah Räthzel and David Uzzell, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012, p. 61. ↑

34. Directive 2014/36/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 February 2014 on the Conditions of Entry and Stay of Third-Country Nationals for the Purpose of Employment as Seasonal Workers. ↑

35. Association d’accueil agricole et artisanale (A4), “Ancrage dans la terre et liberté de circuler,” in Terres et liberté, ed. Fatima Ouassak, Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2022, p. 89. ↑

36. Ibid. ↑

37. Ibid., p. 83. ↑

38. IPES-Food, Land Squeeze: What Is Driving Unprecedented Pressures on Global Farmland and What Can Be Done to Achieve Equitable Access to Land?, 2024,https://ipes-food.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/LandSqueeze.pdf, accessed December 16, 2025. ↑

39. Daniel López García, “Transición ecosocial y mundo agrario. Brechas, puentes y horizontes comunes,” Pensamiento al margen: revista digital sobre las ideas políticas, no. 18 (2023), p. 121. ↑

40. Rossman, Food Workers’ Rights as a Path to a Low Carbon Agriculture, p. 62. ↑

41. A4, D’égal à égal. ↑