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Climate Refugees
00:27:55
More or Less looks at child poverty, climate refugees and Sir Henry Cooper's greatest...
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- [00:00]
Hannah Barnes
Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC. You can find out more about our programme on our website, BBC.co.uk radio4. But before you do that, here's Tim Harford.
- [00:15]
Tim Harford
Hello and welcome to More or less Always willing to enter the ring and go 12 rounds against lazy or deceitful number crunching. The voice of the electorate knocked us off there on Friday, but we don't stay down for long.
- [00:28]
Narrator/Commentator
And Clay is down. Cooper has downed him. Oh, a beautiful punch there, Sir Henry
- [00:34]
Tim Harford
Cooper's most famous moment. More of that later. We'll also be asking what statistics about child poverty really tell us. We'll revisit the curious case of John Charles. And the geographer Danny Dorling will be dipping into his database to challenge our preconceptions about Britain. But first, a few weeks ago, the blogosphere was awash with accusations of a grand climate change conspiracy. The un, so they claimed, had tried to cover up a prediction made about climate refugees. By 2010, it's been forecast climate change or other environmental changes will force millions of people to flee their homes. You will have noticed that this no longer counts as a prediction, but as a historical claim. So where are these migrants? Hannah Barnes has been looking into this for us. Hannah, what's the story?
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Hannah Barnes
Well, this controversy is all about the prediction that there was supposed to be 50 million climate refugees by the year 2010 and a corresponding map that appeared on the United Nations Environment Programme's website. The map attempted to show where those refugees would come from. Now, an Australian blogger called Gavin Atkins had been wondering about this map.
- [01:47]
Gavin Atkins
I produce five blogs every week. One of them was a blog about climate refugees. And I recalled seeing a map that was produced by the United Nations Environment Program, which purported to show where 50 million climate refugees would come from by the year 2010. So I had a look at the Census data for 2010 and Lo and behold, found that around the world, the areas that they'd suggested would be the sources of millions of climate refugees were in fact, areas that were in increasing, in population.
- [02:17]
Hannah Barnes
Now, once Gavin Atkins called attention to the map, something interesting happened.
- [02:22]
Gavin Atkins
After a few days, I got an email saying that the United Nations Environment Program had taken the map down. I put out another blog post mentioning this fact and from that point, it took off. Within about five days, I had the most popular environment story on the Internet.
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Tim Harford
And did the UN have an explanation for what was going on?
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Hannah Barnes
Well, initially, no. When you tried to go to the page where the map once was held, it gave a rather bizarre error Message.
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Stephen Castles
Dear visitor, it seems like the map you're navigating by is maybe not fully up to date or that it might have an error in it. Or is it that your GPS is not loaded with the correct data. We're just taking the scenic route, darling. See, honey, we're not lost. I know where we are. This way, I think.
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Norman Myers
Hmm.
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Tim Harford
Are you seriously trying to tell me this was the message on a UN website?
- [03:15]
Hannah Barnes
Yeah, it was. I saw it with my own eyes.
- [03:17]
Tim Harford
Obviously not the scenic route thing, though.
- [03:19]
Hannah Barnes
Even. Even the message about the scenic route. And we have the screenshot on the more or less website as well. For other people to see it, I should say it's changed to something a little more sober now. I asked the spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, or United States unep, why the map was removed. He told me that he had asked for it to be removed because it was wrong. He was also keen to stress that just because something's hosted on their website, it doesn't imply that they agree or disagree with it.
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Tim Harford
So they've distanced themselves from the whole thing.
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Hannah Barnes
Yeah, completely. But there are two problems with that. So, first of all, UNEP actually helped fund the original study that came up with the data contained in the map. And second, this figure, the 50 million and others from that same study have been widely quoted by other UN agencies, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and by governments around the world. For example, it was used in the Stern Report here in the UK, which said there would be 200 million refugees worldwide by the middle of the century.
- [04:16]
Tim Harford
OK, so this is one of those statistics that just somehow takes on a life of its own. Have you found out where it came from in the first place?
- [04:22]
Hannah Barnes
Yeah, it comes from two pieces of work by an Oxford based scientist called Norman Myers. One is a lengthy paper in 1995 and then a shorter speech given in 2005. And it seems to have been accepted without question by several influential bodies, even though some academics express doubt about the numbers right from the start. Stephen Castles is associate Director of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University, and He says the 50 million figure should never have been taken seriously.
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Stephen Castles
The figure is absolute nonsense. There's no evidence whatsoever that anything like that number of people who have been forced to move by climate change. And Norman Myers, who I know we've discussed together, is an environmentalist. And I think his objective in putting forward these dramatic projections was to really scare public opinion and politicians into taking action on climate change, which, of course is a very laudable motive. But the Problem was that he really used a method to make projections that is really not permissible at all. He simply took a map of the world, worked out what areas would be inundated if the sea rose, say by 50 centimeters, and then simply assumed that all the people affected by this sea level rise would have to migrate and that a lot of them would migrate to developed countries. And really there was no basis for it. People in the migration and refugee field were very shocked by that. And we asked, where is the empirical evidence for that? And of course, there isn't any.
- [05:59]
Tim Harford
So now the un, they've distanced themselves from the number as well, and they've said it's wrong. So what does Norman Myers say? I mean, is he standing by his prediction?
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Hannah Barnes
Well, I asked him just that.
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Norman Myers
I spent about 18 months interviewing governments, agencies, scientists in the various countries on the ground in China, Brazil, India. I've been to 38 refugee camps and many of my critics have not been to half a dozen. This is not Norman Myers seeking prominence. The Stern Report, he says that there are these climate refugees.
- [06:31]
Hannah Barnes
But he was using your numbers.
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Norman Myers
No, no, I think maybe 1/20 of his report drew on my numbers.
- [06:40]
Hannah Barnes
Your numbers have been picked up by some very high profile bodies, the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change and UN agencies, governments. And they've said that that 50 million figure is wrong. Now, do you accept that it's wrong?
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Norman Myers
No, I don't. I think it's very cautious. It's very difficult to say how many there are and where are they and to point out to a crowd over there on the horizon and say those are environmental refugees. It is difficult. I would not like to be the person who tries to come up with an exact precise figure. But in the long run, I do believe very strongly that it will be better for us to find we have been roughly right than precisely wrong. I would be very suspicious of somebody who said, where are they? I think it would be much harder to demonstrate that there aren't any of these environmental refugees than to demonstrate that there are environmental refugees.
- [07:33]
Hannah Barnes
But if you can't prove that there are, then we shouldn't be making the statement, should we? We can't prove it.
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Norman Myers
Well, you can't prove that smoking causes cancer. Science is never, never, ever completely final. It's always a bit iffy.
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Tim Harford
Iffy, good word, great word.
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Hannah Barnes
But to be fair to Norman Myers, he does make it clear in his research that not everyone he classes as an environmental refugee will flee their country. He just says that they'll be forced to move and that could well be internally.
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Tim Harford
Are there any other estimates out there about how climate change may be affecting people's movements? I mean, Norman Rice has got a point, right? It's hard to be sure how many refugees there are, and the whole idea seems fairly plausible.
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Hannah Barnes
Yeah. Well, here's Stephen Castles again.
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Stephen Castles
All the empirical evidence we have suggests that when climate change takes place, and it's a very real problem, I don't want to play that down at all. The first thing that people try and do is to adapt and to try and change the way they live and work in the place where they are. Only a very small proportion of people choose migration as an adaptation strategy and then it's usually fairly short distance migration. So people try and rebuild their livelihoods rather than move moving long distances. The study I know best concerns a Pacific valley in Nepal which was studied by Nepalese and US researchers. What they found was that some people changed the way they produced on the land. Other people moved into urban occupations in small towns within the valley, and a very small number of people moved to the capital of Nepal, Kathmandu. The interesting thing was that they were able to link these different strategies to different groups in the population.
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Hannah Barnes
Has a more reliable number on people who are migrating, has that materialised?
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Stephen Castles
From these studies, we distinguish between sudden onset disasters and slow onset changes in the environment. Most research shows that people who are forced to move by such sudden events often return and try and rebuild their livelihoods where they were in the first place. With slow onset events, you know, if the climate changes and a place gets drier, people do have time to adapt, to change the way they work. And migration is much rarer now. We do have some cases where places have become, or are likely to become uninhabitable. There were these very small Pacific islands like Tuvalu and Kiribati, but of course the populations there are very small. We're talking about a few thousand people, ten thousand at the very most. There. One would say migration to New Zealand or Australia might be the long term solution for at least some of those people.
- [10:26]
Hannah Barnes
But that's tens of thousands, not tens of millions.
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Stephen Castles
Absolutely. Yes.
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Tim Harford
Stephen Castles from Oxford University's International Migration Institute. And of course our own Hannah Barnes. Thank you, Hannah. You're listening to More or Less in association with the Open University. I'm Tim Harford. If you have any comments on that piece, our email address is more or lessbc.co.uk or you can stalk me on Twitter. My username is Tim Harford and to be honest, I rather like the attention now. Matt Kane got in touch with me via Twitter to say on 36 hours of train journey across Turkey last week, I listened to all nine hours of available more or less podcasts. A record. Good question. You tell us, is Matt Kane the most loyal listener in more or less history? Last Sunday we heard the sad news that Sir Henry Cooper had died. Sir Henry was the most respected British boxer of his generation, Celebrated for his powerful left hook, which famously, he used to knock down Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius clay, when the two men met in the ring in 1963.
- [11:28]
Narrator/Commentator
Just seconds left of this fourth round and it's clay poking out one, two left hand and getting a good left hand from Cooper in return. A very solid one there by Cooper into Clay's face. Now Clay tries to come back the left foot. And Clay is down. Cooper has downed him. Oh, a beautiful punch there. And as the bell goes, Clay had just been dropped by a beautiful punch from Cooper.
- [11:51]
Tim Harford
But what happened immediately after Ali fell to the floor right at the end of the fourth round has become the stuff of legend.
- [11:59]
Narrator/Commentator
Now all the gloves burst. Clay's left glove has burst. I say now, that is an extraordinary thing.
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Tim Harford
The story has circulated ever since that fight that Ali's trainer, Angelo Dundee, either tore Ali's glove or made an existing tear worse in order to buy Ali time to recover while the tear was examined. Or in some versions of the story, while a replacement glove was found. In other words, he cheated. Now, you might think this isn't obvious more or less territory, and you may be right. But we couldn't resist fact checking this now infamous tale using one of the most technical tools in the more or less arsenal. Listening to the audio recording of the fight with a stopwatch in hand. The gap between rounds one and two was exactly one minute. The gap between rounds two and three was again exactly one minute. Same again for rounds three and four. But the gap between rounds four and five, the moment of the torn glove incident, was precisely one minute and six seconds. So there you have it. The torn glove bought Cassius Clay an extra six seconds. Not enough, I suspect, to have made much difference to the final outcome of that historic bout. But fans of Sir Henry will still take pride in the fact that only four men ever knocked Ali down and one of them was Henry Cooper. In late April, the oecd, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, released a report stating that progress in reducing child poverty in the UK has stalled. The OECD says that cuts in the welfare budget will only exacerbate matters. The Chancellor, George Osborne says the problem has been caused by the recession he inherited and the solution isn't spending, but ending welfare dependency. On the Today programme, Polly Toynbee of the Guardian made this point.
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Hannah Barnes
If you look at the countries where
- [13:52]
Tim Harford
there is least child poverty, there are
- [13:54]
Hannah Barnes
also countries where the incomes are most equal.
- [13:57]
Tim Harford
Of course, Polly said a lot more than that, but we picked that particular claim out because it caught the ears of loyal listener Richard Smith. This observation really tells us nothing useful. When you look at how child poverty is defined, it's fairly easy to see that it's inevitable. The point is that child poverty is defined as a household income of less than half the national median. So of course a more equal income distribution will mean less child poverty. I'm sure one of your tame experts could explain. Let's see. The OECD's poverty line is indeed drawn at 50% of the median income, which is what's earned by someone right in the middle of the income distribution. The poverty line is then adjusted according to household size. Bigger households are expected to be able to get by on less money per person. The curious thing about this definition is that if we all woke up tomorrow and found that our income had doubled, poverty rates would be completely unchanged. The OECD's poverty line is closely related to income inequality. So Richard Smith is right. What Polly Toynbee said was true, but it was nearly true by definition. The UK used to have a different poverty line, 50% of mean income. But the problem with that is that mean income can be affected by rises and falls in the income of a few billionaires. So the UK has replaced that poverty line with another 60% of median income, which happens to be about the same level. And the European Union also has a poverty line which is also 60% of median income, calculated country by country. I spoke to Jonathan Bradshaw, professor of Social Policy at the University of York, and asked him for what the implications of that were.
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Jonathan Bradshaw
Well, for comparative purposes, if you use it in international comparisons, it's 60% of national median income, and it means that the threshold is very different in different countries. So just for example, the threshold in 2008 in the United Kingdom was €24,000, and in Estonia, the same threshold of 60% of the median was €10,000 per year. So you're saying that people are living below the same threshold, but in fact that threshold is very different and you're not really comparing like with like. And in the European context, that's effectively what you're trying to do.
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Tim Harford
So you can have rich countries with what look like high poverty rates next to poor countries with what look like low poverty rates.
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Jonathan Bradshaw
Yes, but the level of poverty that those people are living at is very different.
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Tim Harford
Well, presumably we've just been through a recession. The number of poor people will go up once you go through a recession, or is it not as simple as that?
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Jonathan Bradshaw
Well, it depends what happens at the threshold. If the median goes down, then the proportion of people living below 60% of the median will go down. And incomes have fallen in this recession. And we are going to have to wait and see whether the official poverty threshold has gone down or not. It has in Ireland already. And curiously there's been a reduction of poverty in Ireland at a time when their unemployment is going through the roof.
- [16:57]
Tim Harford
So all those measures, although they're all slightly different, they're all measures of relative poverty. You're poor, you have less income than some benchmark, and the benchmark is defined relative to the average member of society, one way or another. Now I guess there's another way of doing it, which is to say you're poor if you haven't got enough money to afford some group of goods that are necessary, some sort of absolute measure. Now is there any way that uses absolute measures?
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Jonathan Bradshaw
We used budget standards based poverty measures in this country until the Second World War. The person who established this method was C. Bohm Roundtree in his first study of poverty in York in 1898. And he used a budget standard based on a food budget adequate for minimum necessities, for mere physical efficiency. And he priced this food budget the lowest prices in York. And he added a bit for clothing and fuel and rent. And he said that anybody with an income below this standard was poor. It's been described as an absolute poverty measure, but in fact there isn't such a thing as an absolute poverty measure, even in its initial harsh manner relative. But those kinds of measures went out of fashion in Britain in the post war period. And really the only rich country that has continued with that kind of measure is the us.
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Tim Harford
Now, is there a way to say that the relative measure of poverty is better or the absolute measure of poverty is better, or is it just a matter of taste?
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Jonathan Bradshaw
We need to measure poverty in a variety of ways. My preferred method of measuring poverty is to use a combination of low income, however defined, and deprivation indicators.
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Tim Harford
When you say deprivation indicators, what do you mean?
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Jonathan Bradshaw
Well, social scientists in Britain in the 50s and 60s developed these methods of measuring poverty by asking people whether they lacked things which were described as necessities. And so they asked households whether they lacked items because they couldn't afford them. And if they lacked two or three or four of these necessities, they were defined as living in poverty.
- [19:03]
Tim Harford
That sounds very reasonable. I guess the only problem is that once you start making this whole thing very multidimensional, different measures of poverty, people start picking and choosing the measure of poverty that suits them and that suits their particular ideological arguments they want to make. How would you combat that?
- [19:18]
Jonathan Bradshaw
That's happening already. We've got a whole battery of poverty measures which are published every year in the households below average income statistics. And I think the answer is that we do need to know what is happening on the basis of a variety of measures. 60% of the median has up to now been the headline measure and I suspect it will continue to be the headline measure. But we also need to know what's happening to deprivation because of the problems with 60% of median measure.
- [19:43]
Tim Harford
But if somebody says poverty is rising or poverty is falling, the first question that springs to mind should be by what measure? Yes, indeed, Professor Jonathan Bradshaw. Professor Bradshaw has been involved in one of the most recent attempts to create a minimum income standard under the auspices of the Joseph Rowtree Foundation. I spoke to Chris Goulden, the research manager at the foundation had asked him to explain how their minimum income standard, or mis the was calculated.
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Chris Goulden
It's essentially a democratic process. So it's based on what ordinary members of the public think we all need for a minimum acceptable standard of living. It's quite a clever process. So it gets groups of ordinary people together to talk about the things we need for this minimum income standard. So what the researchers do is they come up with a case study family and then take the group through their imaginary house. And the group has to think about all the things that they would need as a minimum to kit out their house. So things to sit on, food they need in their kitchen, a cooker, a fridge, things for their bedrooms, curtains, all the kind of basics for your home. And the groups also decided that to play an acceptable part in society, you don't just need things in your home, you also need to kind of take part in social activities. So things like birthdays, a kind of very basic one week self catering holiday in this country, were included in the budget as well. And then you get a final figure for what the budget costs, different family types each week. And then you can do some further calculations using the current tax and benefit system to work out how much money you would need to earn gross to reach that standard.
- [21:17]
Tim Harford
Presumably there are some items that are really uncontroversial Everyone agrees you need a roof over your head. Everybody would agree that you don't need, say, first class air travel around the world, but there must be borderline items. What are the controversial items that just made it into the list of necessities or that were just left out?
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Chris Goulden
I think some of the areas where there was most debate amongst the groups were perhaps around some of the consumer electronics items in the budget. There is facility for a very basic TV and also a mobile phone, a pay as you go, with a very kind of limited amount of credit on it.
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Tim Harford
Do you regard this as a poverty line?
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Chris Goulden
We don't call it a poverty line because I think it depends on how you think poverty should be conceptualised. Some people would call this a poverty line. There's a lot of room for different ways of looking at poverty. I think there's no single measure that is the way you should measure poverty. Each measure has its pros and cons and tells you different things about different aspects of poverty. So I think this is something else that gives you a different angle.
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Tim Harford
How do your measures compare with the standard used by the OECD as a poverty line, which is income, 50% of the median income? Is your line higher or lower or does it depend on the different case studies?
- [22:35]
Chris Goulden
So we have income standards for lots of different family types, those working age, single and couples with and without children, and also single and couple pensioners. In general, the couples and singles with children are about 70% of median income, which kind of compares with the 60% of median income that's the typical relative income poverty measure.
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Tim Harford
And for pensioners is that different?
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Chris Goulden
It is a bit lower. It's about 50 to 55%. I mean, we had no idea where the budgets were going to come out. And I think the fact that they are kind of plus or minus 10% of the poverty line does kind of validate the relative income poverty line as something that does mean something, although it is in and of itself an arbitrary way of assessing it, because there's no reason why you should take 60 or 50 or 70, but because no way of measuring poverty gives you a very precise definition of poverty, they're all proxies for it. I think showing that it's in the right ballpark is a very useful finding.
- [23:35]
Tim Harford
Chris Goulden of the Joseph Roundtree foundation and their next Minimum Income Standard Report is out in July. And thanks to Richard Smith for his question. Send your own to moreallessbc.co.uk, or surf on over to our website BBC.co.uk morealles for a snoop around. Several of you took the trouble to send us an email about the mysterious case of John Charles. Two weeks ago, if you remember, our listener Richard Anderson went to a dinner to discover that all five dining companions had fathers with the name of John Charles. What were the chances of this? Stand up Mathematician Matt Parker of Queen Mary University of London delivered abravura explanation. He investigated the popularity of names at the time and pointed out that John might go hand in hand with Charles for various reasons. But some of our listeners are a tough crowd. Many of you wrote in to point out that John Charles, a star footballer for Leeds, Wales and Juventus in the 1950s, might have influenced the baby names of the time. The truth is, our editor did actually suggest we consider the influence the footballer John Charles might have had on baby names in the 1950s, but as so often, we ignored him. Here on More or Less, we are firm believers in the idea that numbers can reveal truths that defy the conventional wisdom. And we're not alone. Professor Danny Dorling is a geographer at the University of Sheffield who's become famous for the way he maps the state of the nation. His new book is so youo Think youk Know About Britain, and we invited him simply to surprise us.
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Danny Dorling
A lot can be said about us according to where we live. For one thing, money makes us move. When we suffer major shocks to our wealth, our home address will often change. The more times a person's heart is broken, the nearer they'll tend to move to the sea. Home moves are more frequent amongst those who separate and tend to take people aged over 40 away from cities rather than towards them. And for divorcees, those who remain single, they're more likely to end up in Blackpool than anywhere else. Some often cited stereotypes simply aren't true either. Gun crime is more common in the countryside than the city.
- [25:55]
Hannah Barnes
Aye, get off my land.
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Danny Dorling
Muslims are far more likely to marry non Muslims in Britain than Christians are to marry non Christians. There are no ghettos in Britain. According to accepted definitions, a ghetto is an area where most people belong to one group and most of that group live in that area. Our last ghetto was the Jewish enclave in Whitechapel a century ago. Most children who live above the fourth floor of tower blocks in England are black or Asian. High rise Living with children in Britain is almost always not luxury living. Most of these children are poor. In Britain, more boys are born than girls, but not as many more as when I was young. And this helps to explain the age old question, where have all the good men gone. Well, they've gone in greater numbers from Londoners compared to any other British town or city. Within a decade, London went from having a surplus of young men for every young woman to a dearth. This was because of girls being allowed to study more equitably at school and winning fairer access to universities because of changes in the demand for different jobs and skills, and even because, at the margin, fewer boys have been born than before.
- [27:12]
Tim Harford
Professor Danny Dorling. That's all we have time for this week. We'll be back in our usual slot on Friday lunchtime and of course, repeated on Sunday evening. And next week's episode will be the last of the current series. Please do send us your suggestions and comments to more or lessbc.co.uk. and yes, we are still trying to figure out whatever has become of Dibble. Perhaps we'll have news next week. Until then, goodbye.
- [27:39]
Hannah Barnes
More or Less is presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover economist. The More or Less team is Richard Varden, Richard Knight, Wesley Stevenson and me, Hannah Barnes. More or Less is made in association with the Open University.