From Climate Futures to Future Migration: The Groundswell Reports and Their Reception in German Media Discourse

Over the past decade, international organizations have sought to raise awareness about climate migration and secure its place on national political agendas. Scholars have critically examined how these organizations frame climate migration and what assumptions inform their efforts to set the agenda. Yet, little attention has been paid to the temporal logic and futurity underpinning this discourse: It treats climate migration as an anticipated threat, rather than an observable phenomenon. We address this research gap by exploring how climate migration is established as a social problem of the future and examining this process at the intersection of international expertise and national public discourse. Drawing on the sociology of imagined futures, we conceptualize the discourse on climate migration as “politics of the future,” a symbolic struggle over how the future is imagined, evaluated, and rendered consequential for the present. We distinguish two key dimensions in this politics: the credibility of projected futures and their societal relevance. Empirically, the article combines a close reading of the World Bank’s Groundswell reports with a qualitative analysis of their reception in the German media. The findings reveal both the potential and the pitfalls of framing climate migration as a social problem of the future: As projections are translated, contested, and misinterpreted in ways that serve divergent political agendas, climate migration becomes both a stake and an instrument in the broader politics of the future.