The IKETIS project focused in the UK, a traditional host country for migrants and refugees in general, and highlighted that media and NGOs frames of climate migration contribute to both reducing the complexity of the issue and giving rise to anti-immigrant policies and attitudes. It used e-learning tools to promote narratives that depict climate migrants as creative and knowledgeable actors with voices, experiences, and aspirations. The sequence of the research consisted of four phases:
First, the policy, institutional, and definitional factors that impede meaningful discourse formulation and media coverage of the issue were identified. More particularly, the project explored why media coverage of the link between climate change and migration neglects topics such as vulnerable people’s inherent rights and justice in respect to climate change related risks and responsibilities. The research also identified the main factors that best describe the climate migration issue, and each of which emphasises a different subset of relations between climate change and migration, and explored how a climate justice frame would allow the evolution of conceptual perspectives that are more conducive to safeguarding vulnerable communities’ rights and interests.
Second, a critical discourse analysis (image and text) and frame analysis of the representations of climate change induced migration was performed in a cross-section of online news media in the UK that included quality, mid-range and tabloid news from 2014 to 2016. The project demonstrated how images interact with the text to co-construct and present specific discursive packages to the general public, and also pinned down their content more precisely to understand how they might affect policy and public understanding of the issue.
Third, using these findings, the research focused on how UK humanitarian and environmental NGOs utilized and challenged the frames identified by online news media coverage of climate displacement. It looked at existing environmental and humanitarian NGOs online campaigns imagery and text and employed qualitative research methods, such as interviews with NGOs staff members, to explore how the messages designed by NGOs convey and enact the notion of a responsibility to act. It offered a framework for understanding how the visibilities or invisibilities of certain aspects of the issue of climate change induced migration in NGOs campaigns relates to questions of the political agency of vulnerable communities, consequences on their inherent rights and implications upon the public understanding of the issue.
Then, based on the understanding of the representational practices that formulate climate migration mediated discourse and by employing quantitative research methods (behavior survey), the project promoted framing of climate change as a social justice issue (climate justice approach). It focused on capacity building of journalists, NGOs and policy-makers to best use climate justice frames and narratives, and respond effectively to the challenges presented by climate migration through e-learning strategies.
