Khalid Bencherif
Visiting the Global Migration Institute
Fall 2026
Khalid Bencherif is an award-winning Moroccan journalist based in Berlin in Germany, specializing in climate migration and environmental displacement across North Africa and the Mediterranean. He won the 2022 Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling from the International Center for Journalists and was a finalist for the Livingston Award in International Reporting for his investigation into climate-induced migration from his native oasis village in Morocco's Tafilalet region.
His work focuses on uncovering hidden climate displacement stories that official migration statistics miss. As a native Arabic speaker with over a decade reporting across North Africa, he brings unique cultural and linguistic access to communities experiencing environmental collapse. His reporting has appeared in In These Times, Knight Center for Journalism, and Earth Journalism Network.
Recently, he has become more interested in AI projects; he is working on “ONWAN”, an AI editor tailored for Arabic journalism.
Research focus while a Bridging Divides Fellow
Khalid's research investigates the phenomenon of "hidden climate refugees" within Toronto's Moroccan diaspora. Official immigration paperwork typically lists economic, family reunification, or educational reasons for migration. However, his decade of reporting across North Africa reveals that climate displacement often hides behind these administrative categories.
Khalid plans to interview Moroccan-Canadian families who migrated from rural Morocco over the past two to three decades, using oral history methods to uncover environmental factors that official migration data misses. Core questions include: How many "economic migrants" are actually climate refugees who lack the vocabulary or documentation framework to describe environmental push factors? What happens when climate trauma goes unrecognized in integration processes?
His positioning as a native Arabic speaker and cultural insider enables community access that external researchers cannot replicate. He will produce bilingual outputs in English for Canadian policymakers and Arabic for diaspora communities. This research aims to create a replicable methodology for investigating hidden climate migration within other diaspora populations across Canada.
Publications and Reports
(2024) "Can mobile medicine solve the health crisis in Morocco’s remote villages (external link) ". Global Voices.
(2021) “How Climate Change Turned This Moroccan Village Into a Ghost Town (external link) ". In These Times.
(2021) "Tips for Covering COVID-19 Developments in North Africa and the Middle East (external link) ". Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.