01/09/2026

Here comes the Human Tsunami - Julian Cribb

 Surviving the 21st Century - Julian Cribb

Unleashing a migratory crisis on the Planet
                                      AUTHOR
Julian Cribb AM ATSE is an Australian science writer and author of seven books on the human existential emergency. 
He is Co-founder, Council for the Human Future. 
Julian Cribb's latest book is How to Fix a Broken Planet (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

The human tsunami is building irresistibly, with one person in every 20 worldwide now seeking to relocate from their home country to another.

In 2026 there are over 420 million people on the move, seeking new homes in places not torn by war, famine, climate disruption, resource scarcity or political, religious and economic savagery.

Migrants now comprise the world’s third largest population, behind that of India and China, but significantly outnumbering the USA, Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria.

At its root the building migrant tsunami is fed by overpopulation, but also by the forces accompanying it – scarcity of key resources like water, land or food, conditions progressively more hostile and more toxic to family life, and a plague of bad governments bent on war, repression and autocracy.

Humans and our ancestral species have been natural migrants for going on 2 million years, as revealed by a trail of prehuman remains stretching from Ethiopia to China and Indonesia – so there is nothing surprising about our endless quest for new opportunities and horizons. It’s what we do naturally when local resources no longer appear sufficient.

But there is something exceptional about this building tsunami of migration, especially if it results from the abandonment of large areas of the Earth or its megacities as they become uninhabitable. It will be the greatest upheaval in all human history.

The movement has two main components – refugees and voluntary migrants. At last count there were a record 124 million refugees and stateless people adrift, up by over 300% since 2000 (38m). Just above half of these were displaced within their home countries but looking to move. Presently, 1 person of every 67 on Earth has been forced to flee.

There were also 304 million voluntary migrants worldwide in 2024 – a doubling in numbers since 1990 and a tripling since 1975. A Canadian study shows the primary reasons to leave home include education, career, concern about overpopulation and the environment, providing for family, politics, religion, culture, healthcare and poverty. Those, however, are what the migrants state on their applications. There is growing evidence a great many people are relocating ahead of disasters – climatic, environmental or political – which they foresee in their homeland.

The 2026 World Migration Report speaks of “a time of profound global disruption…. Conflicts and violence continue to displace millions, while environmental degradation and climate change are transforming mobility patterns across regions. Rapid technological transformation is altering labour markets and governance systems, creating new opportunities alongside new risks,” it warns. “The scale of current developments is striking. By the end of 2024, more than 83 million people were internally displaced – the highest number recorded in the modern era.”

Resisting the trend towards migration is a global wave of anti-migrant sentiment, notably in countries that have traditionally welcomed new settlers and refugees. Whipped up by right-wing politicians in the North America, Europe, Oceania and parts of Asia “far-right political actors strategically manufacture anti-immigrant sentiment to garner electoral support through systematic fearmongering and racialization of migrants,” says Olivia Weninger of the Human Rights Research Center. In other words, the protests are less about immigration than about the flexing of raw political power by neofascist minorities.

Nevertheless, immigration was a hot-button issue in the two elections that delivered Trump to power in the US, leading to his unleashing of paramilitaries on the populace and the building of concentration camps, evoking ugly echoes of the 1930s.

The question remains: Is the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment real – or an artefact of the global fascist movement? And the answer, probably, is: both. People are often xenophobic, for no other reasons than fear and ignorance of new arrivals. On the other hand, new arrivals may sometimes come in the form of a Mongol Horde, Vandal or Axis army of settler movement and prove less than friendly to the indigenes. So fear of foreigners has sound basis in the human experience, which is being exploited by local right-wing elements in their quest for personal power.

However, fear and resentment of immigrants will do nothing to stem the tidal surge of migration that is coming. In 2019 the Climate Foresight Report estimated there could be as many as 1 billion migrants moving worldwide by 2050. Five years late Swiss insurance giant Zurich put the estimate of the displaced as high as 1.2 billion – one human in every 8.

Largely dismissed by politicians and media at the time as alarmist, these predictions have acquired far more substance in view of the fact that the Earth’s migrant population has more than doubled since 2000 – and, on a linear projection alone, is likely to more than double again by 2050. If one adds progressive breakdown of global food and water systems, overheating of the climate, state failures, the global rise in authoritarian governments and spontaneous wars (possibly nuclear), the projection of 1.2 billion migrants in 2050 is starting to look very conservative. If the forecast by British actuaries is borne out, of 2-4 billion dead, then the mass migration preceding it will involve more than half the world’s population.

“Humanity’s current path will push societies into deeper crises unless we make major changes,” warns Professor of Ecology Corey Bradshaw. “The planet’s life support systems are already under strain and, without rapid shifts in how we use energy, land, and food, billions of people will face increasing instability. Our study shows these limits are unfolding right now.”

The region worst affected by the burgeoning crisis – and the likely source of most of the outmigration – is the tropics which, by 2050, will contain over 4.5 billion people including two thirds of the world’s children. Tropical Africa, especially, is at risk, but equally so are South Asia and Central America. The tropics will shed their human populations first – and the wave will break over the temperate regions.

In such a scenario, regions such as Europe will face a floodtide of hundreds of millions of African migrants, who will sweep away the nations of south Europe, displacing their existing populations into the countries to their north. Those who know their history will recall the Moors once ruled Spain – and may well do so again. Indeed, if allowed to build to its full force the main impact of the human tsunami will be to largely eradicate the nation state as the principal mode of self-governance.

The human tsunami undeniably represents the principal security threat to all countries and people going forward – not the petty nationalistic rivalries and military chest-thumping that have disgraced human history hitherto. It arises directly from the heart of the Planetary Emergency.

Many countries will resort to military means before they are overthrown and their armies dissolved. But despite all the fear and angst, the human tsunami is not to be halted or even stemmed by force, or the violent prescriptions invoked by xenophobes. Because their own actions are feeding it.

For example, the USA whilst waging an internal pogrom against “illegal immigration” is also doing all in its power to manufacture more migrants globally. By promoting the burning of fossil fuels, the US generates overpressures that increase the probability of famines, searing heatwaves, sea level rise and acute water shortages. Thus, America’s policy solution to the migrant ‘threat’ is to multiply the number of migrants!

Russia and Saudi Arabia, and others, are also doing their best to exacerbate the global migrant flood by mining oil. China, while still adding greatly to climate disruption through its fossil fuel emissions, seems at the same time to partly grasp the suicidal implications and is taking new steps as the world leader in renewable, green energy, while at the same time encouraging its own population to shrink.

The human tsunami can only be contained by finding ways to keep people happily settled in their own homelands. This will involve:

  1. An accelerated program to deliver family planning to every woman on Earth and so slow population growth.
  2. Urgent worldwide adoption of both renewable food and renewable energy, to overcome hunger, replace fossil fuels and cool the climate as fast as possible.
  3. A global program to put back the forests, grasslands and wetlands ruined by human ‘development’ over the past century and repair the Earth’s life support system everywhere.
  4. Adoption of a circular global economy, especially for key resources such as water and nutrients, but also for building materials, metals, timber, fibre etc.
  5. Redoubling world aid efforts, to assist those regions most likely to collapse to become self-sufficient in food, water and energy.
  6. Agreement to ban all nuclear weapons and scale back world military spending, redirecting resources to food, health, education and environmental repair.

All of these measures are readily affordable – by the simple expedient of cutting the world arms budget of $2.7 trillion by 25-30% or so and re-directing the funds to repair of the planet and its ability to sustain human life. Such a cut was accomplished back in the 1990s, so don’t believe anyone who tells you it can’t be done. One trillion dollars would go a long way towards rescuing a habitable planet and forestalling the human tsunami. That should be the budget.

There are many other scientifically-based methods needed to head off global mass migration and most of them can be found in How to Fix a Broken Planet. However those listed above are among the largest and most pressing.

Inaction, apathy and disinterest will allow the human wave to engulf us all.

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