The climate crisis is not about a single photogenic weather event. The climate crisis is war, it is poverty, it is radicalisation, it is the disappearance of the habitat families have lived in for generations, and it is the geopolitical and security fallout of collapsing ways of making a living. The result is a movement crudely summed up as a “refugee crisis”

Nesrine Malik

A surreal video filmed by a tourist in “the most perfect location in Greece” last week, posted to show how “a weekend trip turned into survival mode in 24 hours”, could easily pass for a TV climate crisis awareness-raising campaign. It brings to mind two harrowing adverts released by Save the Children in 2014 and 2016, showing what life would look like for a British girl if war came to our shores and she became a refugee.

The brief Greece video unwittingly follows the same script of rapid unravelling: an idyllic waterside scene is instantly transformed, overshadowed by looming fire and smoke, then abandoned for boats, buses and waiting holding pens as hundreds of tired and bewildered people seek shelter and fail to secure flights out.

The tourists get to go home, eventually. But the extreme heat and weather events that have characterised this summer in southern Europe, the internal displacement they caused and the disruption to tourism and the local economy they are wreaking, brings the continent ever closer to what is now a global experience. Over the past decade, almost 22 million people have been displaced every year by weather-related events. The projection is even more staggering. By 2050, the forecast is that 1.2 billion people will join the ranks of climate migrants, most of them from the countries with the lowest capacity to deal with the fallout from global heating.