The documentary Climate limbo tells the story of climate migrants, whose numbers are growing exponentially and who, nonetheless, still live today in a kind of undefined grey area.
Since the dawn of our species, populations of Homo sapiens have been forced to move due to changes in their environment. It was precisely climatic instability that would have driven our ancestors to leave the African continent to escape increasingly arid environments and to begin the gradual process of colonising the planet. Mobility is therefore a well-established adaptive strategy of humankind for coping with climate change. Today, however, these changes are occurring at an extremely rapid pace, unlike anything that had ever happened in the history of the planet, and an ever-growing number of people are being forced to migrate.
Between 2008 and 2014, an estimated 184 million people were forced to abandon their lands due to climatic and environmental changes. By 2050 there could be 250 million new migrants, climate migrants. It is to these people — living in a grey area, waiting for the world to notice them — that Climate limbo seeks to give a voice: a documentary written by Elena Brunello and directed by Paolo Caselli and Francesco Ferri, which will be presented at the upcoming edition of CinemAmbiente.
Climate refugees, as the title of the documentary produced by the Piedmontese NGO APS Cambalache highlights, live in a kind of limbo due to a regulatory vacuum, and despite their numbers growing exponentially, their condition is not yet recognised. "Refugee status cannot be applied to climate migrants, the highest form of international protection," explains Elena Brunello. "This is because the Geneva Convention is based on a well-founded fear of persecution; in this case, it is difficult to demonstrate before a judge that climate change is an agent of persecution against a person or a people." To fill this regulatory vacuum, three possibilities are being examined: creating new legislative instruments, adding provisions to the Geneva Convention, or even reforming the Convention itself.
"In the meantime, climate migrants find themselves living in the condition of a refugee, being perceived as such by society and even by themselves, without however having this protective status recognised. They therefore find themselves in a kind of limbo — they do not belong to any real category. They live like ghosts: they are not seen, and one barely hears them spoken of, nor, even less, their own voice."
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Despite the close and evident correlation between climate change and our wellbeing, this topic still has little traction with the general public. Climate limbo, however, manages to make a phenomenon that we can already touch with our own hands — even in our own country — feel less distant. "To try to bring people living in Italy and in the West closer to the topic of climate change, we decided to interview people who are experiencing it first-hand in our country, such as farmers, climate migrants living in Italy, climatologists and legal experts," says Paolo Caselli. "Usually when we hear about climate change we think of polar bears, narwhals, floods in Bangladesh — all these phenomena are real, clearly, but that does not mean that climate change manifests itself more in those places than, for example, in Milan," declares the documentary's screenwriter. "We were keen to strip away some of this 'exotic allure' that climate change has as something that can always be relegated to a faraway place, and to say that the effects are right before our eyes, in places close to the viewer."
The documentary made by Dueotto Film aims to show the human side of climate migrants, reminding us that for them, fleeing and abandoning their homes is a necessity. "How I ended up in Italy I have no idea — I hadn't planned it, I found myself here, and to get here I really risked my life," says Queen in the film, a young woman who fled Nigeria and applied for climate refugee status. "In Bangladesh the sea eats the land and kills agriculture," recounted Rubel, a climate refugee from Bangladesh. "In my country it is very hard to live. The sea took away my home, the sea takes everything away."
Yet in the debate on migrants — continuously exploited by politicians — there is practically never any reference to the issue of climate refugees. "Because it is a 'new' phenomenon, one that is emerging now," tries to explain one of the directors, Francesco Ferri. "Until recently, probably not even the refugees themselves perceived the actual reality of the problem — that what was forcing them to flee their countries was climate change." The climate of intolerance towards migrants, particularly strong in Italy, could instead be the explanation for this omission, according to Elena Brunello. "The moment these people are recognised as climate refugees, this automatically implies a cost for the institutions that would be required to guarantee certain rights. So talking about climate refugees — thereby introducing into the media debate a new and enormous category of migrants — would probably trigger a reaction of fear and a further closing off on the part of people."
One of the aspects that seems to emerge most powerfully from the documentary is the desire to highlight the interdependence between humankind and the environment and to raise awareness of the consequences of our actions. "The film shows events that visually may seem far apart — such as the melting of glaciers or the decline of bees — but there is a clear connection: we are part of a single ecosystem," confirms Francesco Ferri. "If one part of this ecosystem — in this case, humankind — goes mad, it will have consequences for the entire system. Highlighting this connection was one of the things we were keen to do; the aim was to create a choral documentary that gathered diverse testimonies in order to make clear that everything is connected, that every person through their individual actions can bring about changes in this whole that is planet Earth."
The opening sequence of the film, funded through the Consorzio delle Ong piemontesi with the support of the European Union, is emblematic and highlights the current state of environmental crisis. It is an apparently idyllic scene: grebes swimming on a lake surrounded by mountains, the mist rendering the images almost dreamlike — yet in the background an extradiegetic siren can be heard, growing ever louder, generating an almost unbearable dissonance, a reminder that we are in a state of emergency and that life on the planet is in grave danger.