Teaching Climate Migration:
Stories, Movement, and the Human Face of Climate Change
When we teach climate change in high school classrooms, students often encounter it through graphs, data, and scientific models, which distances its impacts from their daily lives. They might learn about rising temperatures, the rising sea-level, and extreme weather, but they often overlook the direct impact it has on humans. It is important that students learn that climate change is not just an environmental issue; it is a human story about home, loss, movement, borders, and belonging.
Learning about climate refugees helps students see how climate change affects both the planet and the people who live in it. It shifts the conversation from abstract science to the lived experiences of real, everyday people. It also opens the door to teaching that crosses content areas, including English, social studies, and environmental science classrooms.
This thematic package is designed for grades 9–12 and brings together fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and a classroom-ready curriculum to help students explore the growing reality of climate migration.
Dislocation by Tim Butler (2020)
Dislocation tells the story of the climate consequences that India is experiencing and how millions of climate refugees leave India and go to Australia. This leads the two countries to war with each other. Dislocation is a thought-provoking novel that explores the distinct possibility that Australia could be at war with its neighbours in a post-climate-change world and the incredibly difficult moral choices leaders will have to make as a result.
The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle (2024)
The Great Displacement details the struggles of millions of Americans who have been affected by climate change and have made the decision to move. It also discusses the future migration of Americans inland and northward to avoid the continued destruction of their homes due to natural disasters and other consequences of climate change. The book compassionately tells the stories of those already experiencing life on the move while detailing how climate change will reshape the geography of the United States.
Storming the Wall by Todd Miller (2017)
In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, border militarization, and environmental justice movements. Miller chronicles a growing system of divisions between the environmentally secure and the environmentally exposed, while also highlighting stories of solidarity and hope.
Articles & Websites
National Geographic: Environmental Refugee
This article provides an overview of what environmental refugees are and how they come to be. Topics include rising sea levels, the Maldives, cities at risk, drought and desertification, and refugee status. This is a strong supplemental resource for helping students build background knowledge on climate migration.
TROP ICSU Climate Change Curriculum – Climate Refugees Lesson
This website provides numerous resources for educators, including lesson plans, teaching modules, readings, and classroom activities on climate change topics. The climate refugees lesson is designed for high school social studies or environmental science classrooms and includes readings, classroom activities, and suggested assignments, along with a step-by-step user guide.
Additional Resources
Climate Lit: Climate Refugees Resource Collection
This Climate Lit resource topic page curates literature, teaching resources, and classroom materials focused on climate refugees and climate migration. The collection includes book recommendations, instructional resources, and thematic materials designed to help educators teach about displacement, environmental change, and human migration in age-appropriate and interdisciplinary ways. This resource is especially useful for teachers looking to build a text set or thematic unit on climate migration and its human, environmental, and social impacts.
Climate Migrants: A Graphic Guide by Christina Hill, illustrated by Ash Stryker (2024)
This graphic guide introduces readers to the concept of climate migration and explains why people around the world are being displaced due to climate-related events such as sea-level rise, drought, wildfires, and extreme weather. Using accessible language and visual storytelling, the book helps readers understand the social, political, and environmental dimensions of climate migration, including who is most affected and why. This resource works well as an introduction to the topic for secondary students and can help build background knowledge before reading novels or nonfiction texts about climate refugees and displacement.
Pedagogical Strategies for the High School Classroom
1. Start with Story, Not Statistics
Begin with a narrative excerpt (from Dislocation or The Great Displacement) before introducing definitions and data. When students meet a character or a real person first, they become emotionally invested, and then they want to understand the science and politics behind the situation. To help frame climate migration as a human and ethical issue as well as an environmental one, ask them:
- What would make someone leave their home?
- At what point does staying become impossible?
- Who is responsible for people who are forced to move?
2. Use Mapping Activities
To help students see climate change as something that reshapes human geography, not just physical geography, have them map climate migration patterns:
- From coastal areas inland
- From drought regions to cities
- From the Global South to the Global North
Then ask:
- Who moves?
- Who can afford to move?
- Who cannot?
- How might this reshape countries and cities?
3. Discussion Framework: The Big Questions
This framework works well for Socratic seminars, online discussions, or reflective writing:
- Is climate migration a future problem or a present problem?
- Should climate refugees be legally recognized as refugees?
- Who is responsible for climate refugees?
- How might climate migration change national borders and politics?
- What does the word home mean when home is no longer livable?
4. Cross-Disciplinary Teaching Opportunities
Climate migration is a topic that works especially well for cross-disciplinary teaching because it naturally connects to multiple subject areas. In English classes, students can read novels, memoirs, and personal narratives that explore displacement and belonging. In Social Studies classes, students can examine migration, borders, public policy, and global inequality. In Science, students can study the environmental causes of climate migration and the impacts of climate change on different regions of the world. Geography classes can map migration patterns and explore how and why people move. In Ethics courses, teachers can engage students in discussions about responsibility, justice, and human rights.
Why This Topic Matters for Students
Today’s students are growing up in a world where climate migration will likely shape the future of cities, countries, and global politics. Some of them may even become climate migrants themselves or live in communities that receive climate migrants.
Teaching about climate refugees helps students understand that climate change is not just about polar bears and melting ice caps. It is about people, homes, families, and the difficult decisions humans make when the place they love can no longer sustain them.
If you’d like to write your own entry on a book like the ones above, please visit the Get Involved page to learn more!
About the author: This thematic package was developed by Isabelle Morken, a University of Minnesota student.