How We Got to a Hundred and Twenty Million on the Move

There was a year, not long ago, when a hundred million people displaced by climate would have stopped the world's presses. This autumn the registered figure sits past 120 million, and it arrived not as a rupture but as a slope — a few million more each quarter through the hot months, each increment too small to headline and too steady to ignore. That is how the largest movements of people in history tend to feel from inside them: not as a flood but as a rising line on a chart, until one day the line is the landscape. The corridors and relief trusts that manage this migration were built assuming a curve that would bend. It has not bent; it has climbed. Understanding how we got here means resisting the comfort of the single crisis, the one bad summer to blame. The truth is duller and heavier: a decade of small increments, each one survivable, adding to a number no single year would have dared to name aloud.