In 1998, when the United States had long secured its position as a global superpower and a leader in greenhouse gas emissions, soon to be presidential candidate Al Gore delivered a speech at the California Science Center. In it, he painted a bright image of a digital future, where all of the world’s citizens could interact with a browsable, computer-generated, three-dimensional globe. Touching this ‘digital earth’ would activate geographically specific environmental and social information, allowing for a tactile relation to a planetary space that, if unmediated, would be too vast for humans to perceive. The Internet was to play a crucial part in this design, assuring that the project remained public and free. Gore (1998, p. 89) was dismayed that the vast amount of data collected by satellites had not been yet put to use:

In his address, Gore proposes that an increase in the collection of ‘georeferenced’ information would translate into the ability to conduct diplomacy in virtual reality, predict crime patterns with geographic information systems (GIS), preserve biodiversity, predict global rates of deforestation and other climate-related changes and increase agricultural productivity. Global climate change cooperation appears here as a problem that could be solved were the world sufficiently mapped with the latest digital tools. In the 20 years since, the ‘blue planet’, beforehand perceived as the unquestionable common denominator that could transcend differences in social standing (Franke, 2013 p. 14), has become an icon of ‘[the] voracious promise of integration and cosmic naturalisation of capital’ (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015 p. 35). The global economy has been entirely subordinated to the flows of finance: vast quantities of data, remotely collected by mobile sensors and monetised, became the seminal commodity of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019). Just three years after Gore’s optimistic speech, in reaction to the dotcom bust, Google’s leaders embraced their current financial model reliant on increasing ad revenue. Combining their already vast computational power with unparalleled access to user logs, they were able to generate predictions of user behaviour and translate them into parameters of ad relevance. While surveillance capitalism was born in relation to advertising, ads no longer limit its scope. Governments, the military, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and scientists seek access to complex predictive behavioural data traded on the ‘behavioural future markets’ (Zuboff, 2019, p. 45). Speculation on future behaviours, rather than scaring capital away, has become its feeding ground and its propelling machine. In a world where human behaviour is viewed as a free resource to exploit for profit, simulations and risk predictions are a gold mine. The territories of knowledge and information mapped by these markets provoke conflict. The watchers are ‘invisible, unknown, and unaccountable’ and the watched are mere sources of behavioural surplus fed into the predictive machine (Zuboff, 2019, p. 67). Watch or be watched. Map or be mapped (Paglen, 2008).

One of the fastest-growing data sets is predictive and concerns climate-induced migration. For a variety of environmental, economic, political and cultural reasons, ‘the twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant’ (Nail, 2015, p. 1). While the exact definition of a ‘climate migrant’ is still up for debate (Biermann and Boas, 2010, pp. 62–7), environmental change, the economy that triggered it and the related political turmoil provoke researchers to rethink the models of global governance. Whether this means ‘create[ing] new institutions and governance mechanisms from scratch’ (Biermann and Boas, 2010, p. 60) or speculating on ascending forms of transnational sovereignty (Wainwright and Mann, 2018), this challenge calls for a cognitive remodelling of our planet in a hitherto unprecedented manner, one that needs to bypass the borders drawn on traditional maps between sovereign states. Questions concerning our ‘global commons’ or ‘natural resources’ are increasingly important, while simultaneously, as Sussman (2012) identifies, we live in a post-global age, where the only things that slide with ease across national borders are ecological calamity and finance. With that said, the border has not receded from sight. To the contrary, new borders are erected on a planetary scale. In 2009, a team of 28 scientists led by Johan Rockström coined the term ‘planetary boundaries’, which has subsequently become one of the most cited frameworks for thinking about global sustainability (Biermann, 2012; Hughes et al., 2013; O’Neill et al., 2018; Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015; Whiteman et al., 2013). The nine boundaries – atmospheric aerosol loading, nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans, land system change, freshwater consumption, ocean acidification, climate change, chemical pollution, biodiversity loss and stratospheric ozone depletion – call into place a cosmic spatiality constrained by uncrossable borders. As the planet is surveilled by the all-seeing eye of capital, border crossings become the key political problematic.

This chapter explores the connection between cartography and current mapping of climate migration. First it examines several existing representational maps and counter-maps that deal with the movable borders in the era of climate change, with the stipulation that these representational maps do not capture the essence of climate migration mapping. It subsequently proposes that the essence of climate migration mapping today is to be found within the infrastructure of satellite monitoring and security. This infrastructure, such as the European Union (EU) satellite monitoring project Copernicus discussed in this chapter, is built on the assumption that migration predictions immediately require an in-built early risk response system. In consequence, mapping, surveillance and simulation of political risk become indistinguishable, while the ‘behavioural surplus’ of actors in the global South is constantly mapped and analysed in order to ‘secure’ climate migrants before they are even tangibly brought into existence by environmental change. Herein lies the extension of colonial cartographies: just like colonisation requires the production of humans who need ‘colonising’, securitisation requires the production of humans who need ‘securing’ (Duffield and Waddell, 2006, p. 2). This demands a re-evaluation of what exactly ‘cognitive mapping’ (Jameson, 1990) should be in the times that humans are the ones being mapped rather than doing the mapping. Within the futurological prediction of climate-induced migration patterns, surveillance mapping does not restrict itself to space but encompasses ‘space-time’ and the future itself becomes a commodity.

Maps of the Anthropocene

Even a seemingly straightforward projection of a curved surface on to a two-dimensional plane is no simple matter of collecting and communicating information (Harley, 1989). Maps make choices about how they reflect the world (see Pickles, 2004; Wood, 1992). Most famously, the Mercator projection, created in 1569 and still used today, situates the United Kingdom as the centre of the world and distorts the size of continents, asserting the West’s imperial position (Harpold, 1999). Today, Google generates contradictory maps, taking into account political conflicts (Ribeiro, 2009). Much has been written about the relationship between cartography and colonialism, where the map, rather than representing, created the territory that it sketched (Specht and Feigenbaum, 2018; Stone, 1988). Do maps ‘find the world or [do they] make it up?’ (Specht, 2018, p. 1). The partition of Africa by the colonisers between 1881 and 1914 is a prominent example of the latter. The map, based on the imperative of political economies, can summon the territory into existence: ‘The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it’, but rather, ‘space is constituted through mapping practices, among many others, so that maps are not a reflection of the world, but a recreation of it, mapping activates the territory’ (Kitchin et al., 2011, pp. 2, 6). France, Britain and Germany saw in Africa a market that could generate massive trade surplus by buying more than it sold, providing free natural resources and free slave labour.

This overlap between colonial gaze and capitalist imperatives has been explored by numerous critics (Blaser, 2019; Friedmann, 2005; Larrain, 2013; Mbembe, 2003) and kept alive not only by those who, like Zuboff (2019), want to understand political mutations of technological and financial infrastructures, but also by a growing number of interdisciplinary scholars clustered around the term ‘the Anthropocene’ (Haraway, 2015; Mirzoeff, 2014; Moore, 2014; Todd, 2015). The designation has become increasingly popular as a way of pointing out that many ‘natural’ transgressions follow the spatial development of industrial capitalism and colonial history. First coined by the Dutch chemist Paul J. Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), the term ‘Anthropocene’ gained currency in 2007, when paleobiologist and stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz requested that the Geological Society of London’s Stratigraphy Commission review the case for a new geological epoch to replace the currently prevailing Holocene. It has since been hotly debated. Proposed starting dates include the invention of agriculture 8,000 years ago, the invention of the steam engine, the Great Acceleration and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Davis and Turpin, 2015). Recently, however, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) suggested that the Anthropocene is an extension of colonial imperialism, slavery and the fossil fuel trade, dating it back to the 1610 ‘golden spike’ in the geological record. The spike indicates that humans had made an irreversible change to the planet’s biochemistry in consequence of the global slave trade and the intercontinental transport of animals, plants, as well as microbial life forms across the Atlantic Ocean. Lewis and Maslin (2015) argue that the death of 50 million Native Americans and the resulting loss of agriculture as well as subsequent forest regrowth altered the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

There has been no shortage of computer-generated maps, crafted alongside the aesthetics of classical cartography, which aim to measure up to the reality of the Anthropocene and climate change as one of its defining parameters. Esri, the international supplier of geodata, GIS and web GIS, currently valued at over a billion USD, has recently debuted the Anthropocene Atlas, developed by the Wildlife Conservation Society. The website includes several interactive maps ordered around themes such as population density or the rise of megacities (Esri, n.d.). The website GIS Geography¹ has compiled a list of maps, including the Earth Climate Change Global Map by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Surging Sea Map by Climate Central, the Four-Degree Interactive Map by the Met Office and the Sea Level Map by the National Geographic, which are primarily concerned with registering or even ‘proving’ the effects of climate change. While some scholars praise GIS as a possible counter-mapping tool (Kwan, 2012), it has also been the subject of intense critical scrutiny, focused either on its political implications for different social groups (Burrough and Frank, 1996; Obermeyer, 1998; Winter, 2001) or its (in)ability to represent local and contextual knowledge (Aitken, 2002; Elwood, 2001; Ghose, 2001; Sieber, 2000). The obvious thing to point out about the aforementioned maps is that they attempt to register the pace of changes in the biosphere without acknowledging the uneven social conditions that produce them. They implicate humanity equally, an approach that has been consistently criticised for neglecting the specific history of the Anthropocene and its roots in colonial and imperialist economies (Biermann et al., 2016; Cuomo, 2017; Grusin, 2017). Presumably intending to address this problem, CarbonMap.org is an interactive map where countries are resized based on their (past, current and predicted) extractions, emissions, fuel burning and consumption of the resulting goods. These interactive cartograms (maps distorted to reflect a data set) were developed by an independent data visualisation company for the World Bank’s Apps for Climate Change competition. While they attempt to link social and geographical conditions, the limitation is that the cartograms remain organised around nation states. It could be more informative to distribute the data by class – a small group of the super-wealthy are responsible for the lion’s share of global carbon emissions (Klein, 2015). Aware of this uneven social and industrial history, the Atlas for the End of the World (World Maps, n.d.) proposes an ‘ecological cartography’ as a counter-mapping practice organised around biodiversity themes such as land degradation, health of waters or deforestation. These maps, all accessible via a dedicated website, are accompanied by ambitious educational essays that relate current ecological predicaments to social history. Optimistically, however, the authors propose that the problem of distortion and the resulting power dynamics of exclusion in two-dimensional maps will ‘largely absolve itself [due to] global positioning systems (GPS), remote sensing and real-time visualizations with the increasing ability to cheaply stream data to personal computers’ (World Maps, n.d.). They also argue that the key element of ecological cartography is embracing this process, eventually creating an atlas that would be a ‘web-based platform that tracks the evolution of the hotspots, if not all of the world’s 867 ecoregions in real time’ (World Maps, n.d.). These maps can be understood as counter-maps – their purpose is to destabilise or question dominant representations and open up the possibility of mapping the world differently (Nash, 1994; Sparke, 1998). And yet, as if following Gore’s vision, they understand their own maps as sketches for the coming integrated real-time flow of ecological cartography, implying that the objective recording of data is able to correct imbalances of power inherent in the subjective selection and organisation of information in two-dimensional maps.

But does this comprehensive recording and processing of data resolve the problem of power inherent in mapping? The answer seems to lie beyond investigating specific representations made through maps. In an age where both visibility and invisibility can do equal harm, maps also exert power by withholding information. Architect, theorist and head of the Forensic Architecture research group at the University of London, Eyal Weizman (Weizman et al., 2014, p 72) notes that power lies also in the choice of what to ‘un-show’:

New media call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between technology and space. Geography’s recent communicational turn (Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006) considers, for example, how mediation produces new spatial narratives or how media infrastructures are distributed spatially (Adams, 2011), as if directly responding to some of the most influential work in media studies, from Marshall McLuhan’s (1964, p. 5) electronically constructed ‘global village’ to Henry Jenkins’s (2004) ‘convergence culture’, where media are compressed within everyday spaces. Critical geographical research also considers how ‘smart’ technologies such as real-time spatial search apps produce rather than represent the territory. For example, whole working-class neighbourhoods can be excluded from the economic map of the city by not being sufficiently reviewed and promoted on Yelp (Frith, 2017). The current ‘spatial turn’ in media studies is increasingly preoccupied with infrastructure (e.g. Bratton, 2016; Starosielski, 2015) or with analysing how mediation influences how people interact with places (Wiley and Packer, 2010). The focus increasingly shifts from examining how humans represent the world through maps to how the world, that is, our ‘accidental [technological] megastructure’ (Bratton, 2016, p. 31), maps humans. Jennifer Gabrys (2014), for example, describes how in the smart city, humans are not only constantly mapped by machines but themselves become sensors that, continually monitoring themselves, produce behavioural surplus that the machines can analyse and optimise. In some cases, the question then becomes not how to have the mapping machines map us better, but whether machines should map us at all.

This brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s famous if underdeveloped framework of cognitive mapping. In Cartographies of the Absolute: An Aesthetics of the Economy for the Twenty-First Century, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015, p. 73) attempt to map the invisible economies of capitalism, arguing after Jameson that ‘cognitive mapping cannot involve anything so easy as a map’. To drive this point home, in his seminal work on the cultural logic of capitalism, Jameson (1991, p. 409) writes that ‘once you knew what cognitive mapping was driving at, you were to dismiss all figures of maps and mapping from your mind and try to imagine something else’. This is because, as Jason Farman (2015, p. 89) puts it, ‘maps tend to obscure their own authorship to deliver their content, thus seeming to create the interface (and its politics) entirely. As a result, the networks of circulation that allow maps to arrive are often obscured’. Instead, cognitive mapping describes for Jameson (1991, p. 415) aesthetic practices that can grasp the relation between the element and the system, specifically, ‘the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her real conditions of existence’. In simpler terms, it gestures at the relation between our individual understanding of the world and the totality of economic relations at a specific time in history. In even simpler terms, aesthetics that hint at the totality known as capitalism, or the totality of class relations, are doing the work of cognitive mapping. The problem of cognitive mapping bestows a task upon culture. Capitalism, Jameson (1991) argues, is essentially an alienating relation to space and it consequently makes it impossible for our psychogeography to align with the physical spaces that we inhabit. While ‘space’ is for those living under capitalism a scrambled and incoherent territory, aesthetics alone have the power of hinting at the totality behind disjointed elements.

In light of current Anthropocene research, we could speculate whether climate change is a totality separate from capitalism and therefore requires its own type of cognitive mapping or whether mapping capitalism and mapping climate change are, in fact, the same process. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009, pp. 219, 221) argues, for example, that while ‘the story of capital, the contingent history of our falling into the Anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to the idea of species’, while at the same time asserting that nevertheless ‘the whole [ecological] crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism’. Against scholars who argue that the Anthropocene is simply a decoy that diverts attention from the fact that capitalism had been the problem all along (Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Moore, 2017), Chakrabarty (2009, 2017) insists that humanity must develop an understanding of itself as a species, a task that invalidates many of the current ‘humanist’ axioms of historical understanding that aid us in understanding humanity as social, rather than geological.

Perhaps an interactive, GIS-based installation project such as Italian Limes could be cognitively mapping the movable border within this new social-geological dynamic in the Anthropocene (Italian Limes, n.d.). Part of the 2016 exhibition ‘Reset Modernity!’ curated by Bruno Latour, the project explores remote Alpine regions, where national borders between Austria and Italy morph due to melting glaciers and global warming. It advances a new media cartography that does not result in a traditional map. In the spring of 2016, the team led by researchers from the Comitato Glaciologico Italiano, the National Institute of Oceanography and of Experimental Geophysics and the Department of Physics and Earth Sciences at the University of Parma installed a series of autonomic devices at the foot of Mt Similaun. The sensors allowed them to track the changes in the tridimensional geometry of the glacier in consequence of melting ice. The project’s website (Italian Limes, 2016) states:

The installation is based around an interactive real-time representation of shifts in the border, continually measured by a grid of 25 solar-powered sensors, which record change every two hours. This is an automated form of counter-mapping that allows us to grasp the relation between the geological and the social. The border has been considerably altered between the 18th and 20th centuries, chiefly in consequences of the two World Wars, provoking the development of ever-more accurate border mapping tools, beginning with aerial surveys in the 1920s, to trigonometric networks, and finally GPS (Italian Limes, n.d.). Concurrently, Alpine glaciers have been melting at an accelerated rate, eventually provoking adjustment in the social definition of the border. In a 2006 agreement between Italy and Austria, the legal term ‘moving border’ was introduced and alongside it the necessity of constant monitoring of the shifting border and the updating of state maps. The ‘maps’ that Italian Limes creates are not projections onto a two-dimensional plane but rather a projection-mapped three-dimensional reproduction of the glacier and an automated ‘drawing machine’, a programmed pantograph that translates the real-time changes into coordinated drawings. Is this a type of cognitive mapping or maybe, still, ‘[culture] conflates ontology with geography and endlessly processes images of the unmappable system [of global capitalism]? (Jameson, 1995, p. 4).

Perhaps because the idea of cognitive mapping dates back to the 1990s, Toscano and Kinkle (2015) focus on novels, photography, films, posters and – most interestingly – architecture. After Jameson, Toscano and Kinkle (2015, p. 44) argue in favour of making the invisible visible: ‘forcing into being a certain kind of political visibility’ as a form of counter-mapping. They see in aesthetics, and especially in visual culture, an opportunity of grasping the totality of capitalism and therefore acting on the totality of capitalism. Is this not, however, similar to Gore’s imperative that more data means better action, more knowledge means a better world? Gary Marx (2016) sees in this the implicit fallacy of surveillance capitalism – ‘some information is good, more information is even better’. If capitalism ‘represents’ itself in the activity of extracting data, perhaps cognitive mapping is not necessarily an aesthetic project anymore? In The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Jameson writes (1995, p. 10) that postmodern capitalism is ‘inconceivable without the computerized media which eclipses its former spaces and faxes an unheard of simultaneity across its branches’. Technology thus seems to at least provide the opportunity for representing the unrepresentable. But in the current economy, as Hito Steyerl (2012) argues, we are already ‘represented to pieces’. So is the planet – the business of climate data and geodata visualisation is booming. Does the problem really lie in the fact that we cannot sufficiently represent the totality of climate change and capitalism? Do we possess insufficient visualisation tools? Are our mapping technologies not sophisticated or accessible enough?

If the method of surveillance technology is multiplying visibility, making everyone hypervisible and therefore easy to track, prepped for the harvesting of biodata, should we maybe consider withdrawing from mapping altogether? While Jameson’s (1991, p. 36) statement that technology ‘seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control’ remains relevant, in the context of new media, it is important to remember that Jameson (1990) understands representation as figuration, and that he understands ideology, after Althusser, as an apparatus. We do not need, therefore, to restrict ourselves to analysing and producing visual representations but to pay attention to the specific figurations made through the material apparatus. In other terms, Toscano and Kinkle (2015, p. 450) write perceptively that commanding maps result not from a ‘representation of logistics’ but from the ‘logistics of representation’ – it is not (only) about what is in the images but about the forces that produce the images and act on them. This again directs our attention to infrastructures that map rather than the maps themselves. Cognitive mapping is no longer humans trying to map totality. It is the totality mapping us.

Totality maps us: surveilling climate migration

While the map of Africa created by the colonisers – and its continued reflection in the existing geopolitical reality – was a blatant visual proof of economic power, surveillance capitalism does not expose its own logic in the same way. Nevertheless, Zuboff (2019) draws an explicit connection between colonialism and the current form of capitalism. Both define something that had previously not been a commodity as free or as a surplus, whether that is land, water, human behaviours, humans themselves or their cognitive processes: ‘For today’s owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic [under colonialism]’ (Naughton and Zuboff, 2019, para. 28). The term ‘digital native’, Zuboff notes, is cruelly appropriate (Naughton and Zuboff, 2019).

The terms ‘environmental refugee’ and ‘climate migrant’ date back to the 1980s, when the possibility was first suggested (El-Hinnawi, 1985; Myers 1986, 1989). Shortly after, the alarmist discourse, based mainly in the United States, of catastrophic ‘waves of environmental refugees’ (Homer-Dixon, 1991, p. 7), ‘the coming anarchy’ (Kaplan, 1994) and the 200 million-strong ‘environmental exodus’ (Myers and Kent, 1995) began to take hold. A decade later, mainstream news and pop culture caught on. In 2004, Hollywood debuted its disaster blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow; the Guardian ran the heading ‘Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us’ (Townsend and Harris, 2004); and David King, chief scientific advisor to the UK government, stated that climate change represented ‘a far greater threat to the world’s stability than international terrorism’ (cited in Brown and Oliver, 2004, para. 13). In 2007, when Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, the connection between preventing climate migration and the preservation of peace was solidified. No wonder, then, that the most impactful (policy-wise) research related to climate migration right now is in security studies (Baldwin et al., 2014). Climate migration is there envisioned as a security threat to Europe, the United States and Australia before it ever happened. While climate migration has been called ‘the human face of global warming’, images of projected migrants have been criticised as predictable extensions of colonial rhetoric. Numerous studies focus on analysing the dehumanising visual representations of refugees as a threatening mass of bodies or as racialised, docile victims of global warming (Bleiker et al., 2013; Methmann, 2014; Methmann and Rothe, 2014). The global North feels threatened by migrants and by the instability that they are thought to carry within. However, there exists no clearly delineated group of climate migrants. Terms such as ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are already contentious in their misuse and embodiment of existing resettlement policy (Biermann and Boas, 2010). Clearly discerning environmental causes for individual migrations becomes increasingly difficult as ‘climate refugees’ can reject being labelled as such (Farbotko and Lazrus, 2011).

A recent New Yorker article paints regions that are exposed to extreme weather events, sea level rise, drought and water scarcity, especially sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, as the dangerous three migration ‘hot spots’ because they represent 55 per cent of the ‘developing world’s populations’ (Kormann, 2018). However, Miami, Houston, Tokyo, New Orleans, Hong Kong, New York and Amsterdam are also at high risk of flooding and yet the alarmist narrative rarely revolves around the inhabitants of these cities needing resettlement. They are instead commonly portrayed as citizen-saviours that need to fight against global warming (Baldwin, 2012), while the racialised migrants are envisioned as ‘an object of governance’, inherently troubling and in need of control, living on the ‘ground zero of global warming’ (Methmann, 2014, p. 425). While wealthy countries of the North may protect a share of their citizens through ‘adaptation measures such as reinforced coastal protection or changes in agricultural production and water supply management’, it is predicted that those living in poorer countries might need to rely on international support or will have no choice but to migrate (Biermann and Boas, 2010, p. 61). Long-term predictions are potentially catastrophic (Biermann and Boas, 2010, p. 69):

At the same time, some studies predict that most citizens will choose to stay in their countries and migrate locally rather than internationally (Clark, 2007; German Advisory Council on Global Change, 2006); ‘many assessments directly link predictions about changes in environmental parameters with the migration of the current or predicted population living in the affected areas … it is merely assumed that [all] these people will decide to flee’ (Biermann and Boas, 2010, pp. 67–8). The discursive, imagined climate migration is epic in scale. For now, it remains a ‘futurology’, a speculative possibility (Baldwin et al., 2014). Both the news headlines and the security software that is increasingly targeted at migrants are ‘written in a future-conditional tense’ (Baldwin et al., 2014, p. 121). Not to neglect the real dangers of climate-induced uprooting, the mapping of ‘hot spot’ regions is inherently asymmetrical.

Let’s take the EU Copernicus programme, a system created for earth observation and monitoring, as an example. Consisting of satellites and in situ sensors, it focuses on six main areas: land, marine, atmosphere, climate change, emergency management and security, and is handled, among numerous other national bodies, by the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (Wiatr et al., 2016). The data are freely available and Copernicus encourages their use by public, private and research institutions. At the same time, two modules on security and early warning are built in. Drawing on satellite and ground station data, it not only collects information about climate change but measures population pressures, chiefly in African countries. These tools already factor in an emergency response. Environmental monitoring intersects with border control and maritime surveillance; in fact, Copernicus contributes to the European Border Surveillance System by tracking border areas. As Iraklis Oikonomou (2017, p. 1) writes, the EU’s flagship space projects, Copernicus and Galileo, ‘are characterised by an element of politico-military sensitivity due to non-civilian applications that both projects involve’. He urges us to consider that satellite monitoring is currently ‘planned, organised and funded by industrial actors whose primary motive is the maximization of profitability’, thus echoing Zuboff’s argument about ‘future behaviour markets’ that surveillance capitalism produces (Oikonomou, 2017, p. 2). The EU promotes and popularises its space programmes through a security and common benefit rhetoric: ‘Space assets and offered services are today indispensable enablers for a wide spectrum of applications to answer societal challenges in fields such as climate change and environment, transport, development and competitiveness in Europe and beyond’ (European Security Research and Innovation Forum, 2009, p. 166). However, while the official policy reports clearly indicate that the programmes fuel military needs and stakeholder interests, the popular rhetorical impulse is to present them as public, civilian research projects (Oikonomou, 2017, pp. 3–5). Through such coaxing, a symbiosis between the public and the military becomes naturalised (Marx, 2016) as public and private interest are presented as interchangeable (Dwyer, 2016).

These predictive mapping tools are at the same time the tools of implementation – the presupposed climate migrants are controlled, both in their bodily movements as in the images that the media create of them. An existing migrant can be tracked from point A to B by existing state surveillance tools, but a ‘climate migrant’, not in existence yet, summoned to presumed existence by yet-unknown catastrophes, has to be mapped by predictive surveillance. The explosion of a climate catastrophe is a projection-as-implementation tool that legitimises the tightening grip of security technologies along the existing axis of power. Such mapping extends the ‘view from above’, or what Michel de Certeau (1984, p. 92) describes as ‘looking down like a god’, into a pre-emptive strike, where the world, seen from above by military and information industries, is chiefly a safety problem (Steyerl, 2011). For Zuboff (2019), knowledge and information created through surveillance are thus the main territories of power and contestation. Felix Stalder (2018, p. 336) adds that predictions that emerge as a result of such surveillance are a type of magical knowledge – the prediction itself can never be verified because it has already been acted on and therefore the reality submitted to the prediction has already been altered:

In the futurology of climate migration mapping, time itself becomes a weapon. Monitoring tools are spells that call into being what they want to prevent. This is meltdown culture, the volume of data analysis tools and thermal-imaging cameras rising as ice glaciers are melting. Even though climate change is our ongoing, mundane reality, the discourse narrates a coming great disaster, barren lands, starvation and thirst. Surveillance, which touches not just specific information anymore but ‘life in general’ (Lyon, 2010, p. 327), grasps it an eschatology. Within an increasingly mediated experience that we have of the world, incomprehensible climate narratives, despite their scientific reality, migrate to the realm of what previously might have been called the fictional, the simulated or the otherwise designed (Jasanoff, 2010). While we can observe changes in weather, we cannot observe climate change within the bounds of human perception. We know about climate change through a cluster of statements, headlines on the news and other attempts to make vast data sets understandable. Essentially, as far as our experience is concerned, climate change is statistics and simulations. This would mean that speculation and prediction is very much ‘the real’ today. The maps of climate migration might be speculative but this does not mean that they are not real. In fact, they are so real that they become reality.

This finally returns us to the question of Jameson’s cognitive mapping and his assertion that each historical stage of capitalism generates a space unique to it following the ‘quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital in the latter’s penetration and colonization of hitherto uncommodified areas’ (Jameson, 1990, p. 348). As Daniel de Zeeuw (2011, para. 5) summarises:

If the tools of surveillance capitalism colonise and commodify futures, mapping is a question of space-time rather than just ‘space’. While humans increasingly need to be secured and locked within delineated borders, both on a national and a planetary scale, capital flows freely and the ‘escape velocity [that it generates] turns [all of] us into deportees of a new kind’ (Virilio, 2010, p. 13). Paul Virilio (2010) writes about the current space of capital as the space of ‘geocide’, delineated by the creation of zones of free capital through which humans constantly move, continually inserted and expelled, no longer simply restricted in movement but forced into the logistics of behavioural commodity extraction. The surveillance apparatus stratifies, the conditions of uneven access it creates foreclose not only information but the future itself. Integrated with the commercial aspects of the futurology of surveillance and security, digital cartographies hail from the future, retroactively creating the territories that they map.

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