On 17 January the UK government published the Third Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3), recognising the unprecedented challenge of ensuring the UK is resilient to climate change and setting out the work already underway to meet that challenge.

The five-year assessment claims to identify the risks that climate change poses to multiple parts of our society and economy. But it entirely fails to consider one of the most important risks that climate change poses, namely, the consequences for the UK of increases in mass migration, social injustice and war.

These effects of climate change are already being felt in Africa where people are migrating

The New York Times reports that hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans have already fled north toward the United States in recent years, driven by drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation. Brookings states that the international community must confront

• Large-scale human migration due to resource scarcity, increased frequency of extreme weather events, and other factors, particularly in the developing countries in the earth’s low latitudinal band
• Intensifying intra- and inter-state competition for food, water, and other resources, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa
• Increased frequency and severity of disease outbreaks
• Increased U.S. border stress due to the severe effects of climate change in parts of Central America

In 2018, the World Bank estimated that three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia) will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050. And indeed the climate of European countries will also change, reducing their fertility and probably leading to northerly migration of Europeans.

All this will inevitably lead to greater immigration pressure into Europe and the UK. But this newly published report fails to recognise any of these risk, let alone considering what needs to be done to cope with them.