Arctic Circle temperatures hit 30 C last week. Wildfires in Greece destroying villages and taking lives. British Columbia and Ontario battling forest fires that rage out of control.

The extreme weather list goes on. The summer of 2018 is demonstrating that the consequences of climate change are devastatingly real.

Two years ago, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees declared that population displacement is irrefutably linked to climate change, citing numerous “slow” and “fast” onset examples of climate-related incidents — floods, storms, wildfires, extreme temperature, coastal erosion due to rising sea levels — and climate change “threat multiplier” consequences, such as food insecurity and financial instability that exacerbate already-existing socio-political issues. The UNHCR pointed out that, “climate change sows seeds for conflict [making] displacement much worse when it happens.”

According to the Lexis Nexis database of international newspapers, in the past month there were more than 4,600 articles with “refugee” or “migrant” in the headlines (a headline indicating the article’s focus). But the total number of articles headlined with refugees or migrants and climate change? One.

In the past month, U.S. newspapers published 866 articles with headlines related to “refugees” or “migrants.” The number of articles with headlines related to refugees or migrants and climate change in the same time period? Zero.

The Canadian Major Dailies database shows a similar pattern in Canada. Over the past year Canadian newspapers published 774 migrant or refugee headlined articles — but just a single article sharing the headline with climate change.

Even acknowledging that headline searches are not exhaustive (there will obviously be articles that explore refugees/migrants from the context of climate change but lack these specific keywords in the headlines), the searches nonetheless illustrate an extreme paucity of such articles.

Cognitive dissonance proposes that we experience discomfort when our beliefs and actions are incongruent. For example, most people believe if we can help alleviate another person’s suffering, we should. Therefore, if we see someone who needs help, one way to avoid dissonance is to undertake a positive helpful action, thus allowing our beliefs and behaviours to align. When the person who needs help is known to us, the transition from thought to behaviour is easy. But what about strangers who need help?

News coverage about exhausted, hungry, desperate refugees/migrants provides excellent examples of just such strangers. Most of us would agree that feeling compelled to flee one’s home, putting oneself in extreme danger, having one’s child forcibly removed, are horrendous tragedies. Therefore, if we know that people are fleeing and in danger, or children are being taken from loving parents, cognitive dissonance proposes that we will experience discomfort unless we can align our thoughts and behaviours.

Alignment could take two fundamental forms: keeping our values intact by taking positive action to help (speaking out, writing letters, taking to the streets, making donations); or sitting idly by and shifting our values.

How might we shift our values? We could decide that refugees/migrants do not deserve our actions because they are willingly choosing to flee their homelands. We could also decide that we do not need to take action because the crisis has nothing to do with us.

Climate change, however, challenges both of these attempts to assuage our inaction dissonance.

According to a 2015 Oxfam report, the wealthiest 10 per cent of the planet’s population contributes about 50 per cent of the carbon emissions; the poorest 50 per cent contribute about 10 per cent of global carbon.

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But the people most vulnerable to climate change are also most likely to experience extreme weather disasters and climate change’s more generalized threat multiplying effect (food insecurity, heightened violence, etc., due to extreme weather). In other words, climate change has everything to do with the decision to flee one’s home — and those of us in more materially affluent parts of the world have everything to do with climate change.

Yes, the refugee/migrant crisis is extremely upsetting, uncomfortable and dissonant for many of us, but we owe it to those who are suffering to take action. And we should include in our actions asking why news stories about refugees and migrants so rarely include a focus on climate change.

Jennifer Good is an associate professor of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.

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