A Primer on Climate Migration
What is Climate Migration?
Climate change and climate-induced migration have become significant global challenges over the years. Policymakers are increasingly concerned with understanding the phenomenon and its implications for the future of policy discourse. In terms of definition, climate migrants refer to a subset of environmental migrants who were forced to flee “due to sudden or gradual alterations in the natural environment related to at least one of three impacts of climate change: sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity.” Thus, climate migration as a branch of study focuses on understanding people on the move due to climate change. This article aims to highlight the growing repository of global knowledge on climate migration as well as regional and country-specific case studies. Additionally, we highlight some relevant gaps in the literature that can help develop a robust framework for future studies looking at climate change and migration.
What Drives Climate Migration?
With changing global climate patterns, extreme weather events and natural disasters have become more frequent over the last century. Rapid-onset climate hazards such as hurricanes, floods, etc. cause short-term population displacement and a likely return to the source regions. Slow-onset climate events, on the other hand, are incremental changes in climate systems like rising sea levels, desertification, global warming, etc. These slow-onset events are more likely to cause permanent migration, and also present the possibility of voluntary movement of populations before climate conditions get worse.
Both types of climate events also interact with existing social vulnerabilities such as age, gender, ethnicity, poverty and livelihoods, which can drive climate-vulnerable populations to migrate. The drivers of climate migration are nuanced, and recent studies have begun exploring the complexities of migration patterns of climate-vulnerable people. Climate events may have a direct impact on migration, but it is more likely to be an extra nudge to marginalised people’s decision to move, along with other socio-economic and political drivers.
The ‘push-pull’ theory has been prevalent in the traditional literature on climate migration; environmental degradation can reduce employment opportunities in the source areas and thus, environmental factors become a ‘push’ factor for economic migrants. This subject area has long been defined by the framework of environmental changes as a push factor and migration as an adaptive strategy to climate risk. This is changing, however, since new studies are applying the aspirations-capabilities framework to understand the nuances of climate migration. Moving away from the deterministic push-pull theories, the aspirations-capabilities framework supposes that a person may aspire to move to a less climate-sensitive area with better livelihood options, but their ability to migrate depends on various social, natural and financial factors.
Migration is an expensive endeavour, and often, those with the greatest vulnerability to climate change lack the financial and social resources to successfully move to more stable regions.
This leads to such populations being ‘trapped’ in worsening climate conditions, despite wanting to migrate. Climate migration research is steadily expanding beyond livelihood impacts and includes the effect on human rights, health, community, quality of life, etc. This has also led to the growing perception that climate migration doesn’t occur in a vacuum but in a ‘continuum of agency’. Recent climate migration studies using the aspirations-capabilities framework have begun to explore environmental immobility. Usually, this consists of trapped populations, but voluntary non-migration is also becoming a key research area in certain regional studies.
Drivers of Climate Migration in Developing Countries
Research on climate change migration is predominantly focused on developing countries, particularly regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia. One reason for this regional focus can be that most livelihoods in these areas are heavily influenced by environmental and climate changes.
While the popular climate migration debate mostly focuses on cross-border movements, evidence suggests that most climate migration trends are internal and follow a seasonal, rural-urban pathway.
The agricultural pathway is the most commonly studied in terms of climate migration, especially with respect to migration as an adaptive strategy for farmers. Other areas of interest include livelihood systems in coastal regions, forest regions and urban areas.
There is a regional disparity in climate migration: coastal and flood-related migration research is mostly focused in tropical areas (e.g. Bangladesh, India), while drought-related migration is commonly studied in Mexico, Pakistan, and Tunisia. A majority of literature in this field views migration as an adaptive response to climate risk, revealing that policies which give people the chance to move can help reduce vulnerability and build resilience in climate-vulnerable communities.
On the other hand, restricting migration and forceful relocation is likely to expose communities to more risk, especially if they have no say in the decision to migrate. Research has also highlighted some possible positive outcomes from climate-induced migration. One study in India found households of rural farmers who migrated due to climate risk now benefit from outcomes such as livelihood diversification, increased climate resilience, transfer of skills and remittances.
New studies in developing countries are also seeking to understand the phenomenon of voluntary non-migration. Non-migration is often treated as the default state. However environmental non-migration can’t be explained by push-pull theories that view migration and non-migration in a binary. Beyond neoclassical theories, anthropological studies have highlighted that it is community, not a lack of capabilities which makes people stay in a place despite climate risk.
In the rural Himalayan region of Nepal, for instance, people prefer to stay put due to factors like ancestral attachment, social groupings and confidence that they can adapt local survival strategies. In flood-prone regions of Assam, people would rather stay in their villages since they don’t believe their income prospects will be assuredly better in the cities. Among coastal villagers in Bangladesh, some trapped non-migrants became voluntary non-migrants over time, since they had significant access to local natural resources (forests, fishery) that could support their livelihoods and social capital.
What’s Missing in Climate Migration Research?
Some scholars have pointed out that climate migration research seems to have evolved somewhat independently from other fields that study climate change. So much so, that the risk assessment framing found in the IPCC is often missing in climate migration literature. Some of the most relevant areas of future research in this space include an understanding of non-migration drivers, comparative analyses, global and local datasets that allow for more empirical study and evidence-based policymaking.
Studying climate change linkages to the entire migration ecosystem is key- the impact on host communities and regions is quite understudied when it comes to climate-induced migration.
A consistent gap in this field is the lack of conceptual frameworks — even the definition of ‘climate-induced migrants’ is yet to have a universally agreed-upon meaning. There is a persistent need to develop conceptual and methodological means that can address the complexities of climate-induced migration, right from typologies of climatic processes, drivers of mobility as well as immobility.
This article was first published as the May 2022 issue of our newsletter, Gotta Keep On Movin’.
