From their website:

Environmental migration has been the subject of lively debate in recent years. Recent International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) research lets us put this debate into perspective. Microlevel evidence has improved our understanding of how climate affects individual and household decisions to migrate over time in African and Asian countries. Macrolevel analyses help us assess whether such country-specific evidence may be systematic enough to constitute a global phenomenon.

This brief reviews recent evidence, examines main research challenges in identifying migration–climate links and discusses the policy options for formalizing migration as an adaptation mechanism to climate change.

To read the full brief, click here.

The following four main areas for capacity-building received particular emphasis during the workshop: 1) Knowledge base and research capacity on environmental migration; 2) Capacities to devise solid legal and institutional frameworks to ensure the protection of those on the move for environmental reasons; 3) Capacities for comprehensive migration management policies to tackle the multifaceted impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on human mobility; 4) Technical and operational capacities to support vulnerable populations and promote effective migration management in the context of environmental changes.

Recently, the IOM released dialogue number 18 “Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, and Migration” based on these workshop results. The full report can be found here.

Table of Contents

• Chair’s Summary
• Workshop Report
  • Introduction
  • Scope and purpose of the workshop
  • Deliberations and recommendations of the workshop
  • Conclusion
• Migrant’s Voice
• Agenda and Background Paper
  • Agenda
  • Background paper
• Annex
  • Useful definitions
  • Bibliography
  • List of selected international legal and policy frameworks

“When it comes to climate change we speak more on the impact of it on environmental degradation,” said Dina Ionesco, Policy Officer at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). “And then it is the impacts of this environmental degradation on migration.

“We speak also on how migration has a climate change impact so we cover the full circle.”

Often referred to as ‘climate change refugees’ – although IOM steer away from this term and instead talk of ‘environmental migrants’ – once unheard of they are quickly becoming a phenomenon people are all to familiar with.

Just last month the Asian Development Bank warned that there could have been as many as 42 million environmental migrants over the last two years in Asia – as a result of extreme weather events.

And current estimates predict that by the middle of the century the world could see anywhere between 25 million and 1 billion climate related migrants.

But it is very rare climate change will be the only reason a person or groups of persons will leave their home. Climate change is seen as the threat multiplier.

Where a region is under social pressures, is experiencing conflict or political upheaval, or where increasing pressure is being put on infrastructure or resources, climate change – in the form of longer term shifts (i.e. higher temperatures and drought) or shorter changes (i.e. extreme weather events) – can be the final push for many communities.

“Yes climate change is impacting people’s mobility but it is one factor and migration is what we call a multi-factorial phenomenon,” says Ionesco.

“It is very difficult to say when it is just environment which is the main driver and when it is climate change that is the main driver. Very often climate change has an impact on people’s way of living, on their livelihoods, on their local economic and social context and that leads to migration as a response.”

Desertification induced migration in the Sahel

The Sahel – situated in North West Africa – consists of 17 countries including Niger, Chad, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso.

The region is home to around 309 million people and the population is growing on an average of 3% per year.

Plagued with conflict, political turmoil and social crises, the Sahel’s natural resources – on which around 80% of the population rely – are under increasing pressure.

Around 70% of the region’s population lives in rural areas and relies on farming – particularly subsistence farming – for their livelihoods and agriculture accounts for a significant share of the countries’ GDP, food needs, employment and export revenue.

And when it comes to climate change, the Sahel is on the front line. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted the region will be most vulnerable to future climate fluctuations and many effects are already being felt.

With many areas in the Sahel experiencing as high as a 2°C average rise in temperatures, in the same period, the Sahel has also become prone to drought and desertification.

Since 1950 – when people settled in the Sahel region – a concentration of populations around water supplies has lead to overgrazing.

As topsoil was eroded and washed away and crops destroyed by overgrazing, deserts in the region began to expand – with records showing a shift of sand 60 miles south into the area.

Ticking all of the potential boxes for migration causes, the Sahel has gained growing prominence amongst researchers not only in climate change but in migration.

“We have identified hotspots in the Sahel where we have a complexity of issues together. It is land degradation but it is also problems of conflict security,” says Ionesco.

“What is difficult to determine is how much it is climate change alone that has impacted environmental degradation, how much is the use we have made of the land and how much is planning, or the lack of, behind it.

“It is extremely difficult to identify climate change alone.”

In a recent report, produced with the UN Environment Programme the IOM has tried to answer this question, and while Ionesco believes it remains a complex issue, climate change and desertification are having increasing roles in the region’s migration.

“There is no doubt that climate change has a true impact on the environmental degradation. So there is no doubt that this has a migration impact,” she says.

Giving communities choices

Understanding the role climate change is playing in migration, and the relationship this has with other factors is helping organisations such as the IOM give communities a choice about leaving their homes.

Ionesco explains how it is about making migration an option rather than a last resort.

“It is about planning in terms of adaptation to climate change and in terms of urban and rural development. One of the aims of the IOM is to try to bring communities together and to try and speak a common language.

“Trying to speak a common language between meteorology, adaptation and development is a challenge but we are advancing on that.

“For instance where you know that the area is degraded – in Africa but also in Latin America and in Asia – you know there will be migration and because you know that you will facilitate, you will manage, you will plan, you will prepare.

“You will make this migration possible, you will make it a choice, you will give opportunities to people for migration.”

Source: Responding to Climate Change

For the United States and the international community, this region is critical because of its potential for future instability. The proximity of Algeria and Morocco to Europe, Nigeria’s emerging role as one of Africa’s most strategically important states, and Niger’s ongoing struggles with governance and poverty all demand attention. Northwest Africa’s porous borders and limited resources, which allow Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to flourish there, suggest that there is no time to waste in developing better and more effective policies for the region.

The climate, migration, and security nexus is a key test case because it is likely to exacerbate all of these existing risk factors. Climate change alone poses a daunting challenge. No matter what steps the global community takes to mitigate carbon emissions, a warmer climate is inevitable. The effects are already being felt today and are projected to intensify as climate change worsens. All of the world’s regions and nations will experience some of the effects of this transformational challenge.

Changing environmental conditions are likely to prompt human migration, adding another layer of complexity. In the 21st century the world could see substantial numbers of climate migrants—people displaced by the slow or sudden onset of climate change. While experts continue to debate the details of the causal relationship between climate change and human migration, climate change is expected to aggravate many existing migratory pressures around the world. Extreme weather events such as droughts and floods are projected to increase the number of sudden humanitarian crises in areas least able to cope, such as those already mired in poverty or prone to conflict.

Conflict and insecurity present the third layer of the nexus. This final layer is the most unpredictable, both within nations and transnationally, and will force the United States and the international community to confront climate and migration challenges within an increasingly unstructured security environment. The post-Cold War decades have seen a diffusion of national security interests and threats. U.S. security is increasingly focused on addressing nonstate actors and nontraditional sources of conflict and instability. The potential for the changing climate and associated migration to induce conflict or exacerbate existing instability is now recognized in national security circles.

This paper tracks how the overlays and intersections of climate change, migration, and security create an arc of tension in Northwest Africa comprising Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, and Morocco. These four nations, separated by the Sahara Desert, are rarely analyzed as a contiguous geopolitical region. Yet they are linked by existing international migration routes, which thread up from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean coast, moving people and cargo into Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and onward to Europe. Within the region, seasonal labor migration is widespread, particularly in areas vulnerable to rainfall fluctuations.

We seek to examine what will happen when the effects of climate change interact with internal and transnational security challenges along these well-traveled routes, and connect those questions to the strategic interests of the United States, Europe, and the transatlantic community.

Why we must engage in this arc of tension

Why should the U.S. and international policymakers be concerned about this nexus linking climate, migration, and security in Northwest Africa? Challenges related to the mitigation of carbon emissions as well as disaster risk management and economic and human security in the region alongside the need for a secure and stable global economy require strong partners and substantial capacities. Relatively minor investments can create significant progress toward improving security and preparing the region for worsening climate conditions and increased migration. The costs of livelihood security, irrigation, improved migration monitors, and regional water cooperation pale alongside the likely future costs of humanitarian disaster, long-term security gaps, and conflict.

Further, among these particular countries, climate and migration patterns complicate a difficult political terrain. The United States and Europe are already involved in ongoing counterterrorism activities to help stem the growth of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (found in Algeria, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and potentially in Nigeria and Morocco as well) and its possible linkage to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula through this corridor. The ongoing conflict in the oil-producing Niger Delta and the increasing violence of the insurgent Boko Haram movement in northern and central Nigeria, punctuated by the August 2011 suicide bombing of the U.N. building in Abuja, further underline the potential for instability, as does the Tuareg insurgency in northern Mali.

The United States and other countries have a vested interest in helping ensure that areas with weak or absent governance structures—where poverty, environmental degradation, and grievances over central governments and energy production coincide—do not become future recruiting grounds for extremists. The possible impacts of climate-related migration in such fragile situations could be destabilizing.

At the same time increased U.S. involvement in counterterrorism activities holds the potential for a serious backlash. Western involvement in its many forms could serve as a recruitment tool for those who see such efforts as a pretext for American military hegemony and establishing a forward presence in the region to secure future energy supplies and natural resources. Furthermore, geopolitical calculations of Western interest must acknowledge the added dimension of the uprisings in the Middle East and Maghreb. By focusing too narrowly on counterterrorism, U.S. policy risks being at odds with democratization movements. Maghreb states are also wary of how their cooperation with NATO on the Mediterranean Sea appears to domestic groups concerned with independence from the West.

This new pressure for transparency, both within the region’s governments and regarding U.S. policy, puts a premium on nontraditional approaches to security—especially with regards to human security as defined by the United Nations to ensure the security of the individual as opposed to the state. This approach aims to mitigate threats to human conditions—including socioeconomic, political, food, health, environment, community, and personal safety—and maintain social stability.

Major U.S. imperatives in the region, including counterterrorism and reform, would be served by supporting, for example, Morocco’s efforts to peacefully settle the Western Sahara dispute or Nigeria’s efforts to quell ethno-religious violence. Establishing effective governance in Western Sahara and domestic stability in northern Nigeria will allay economic uncertainty in the region and reassure other states confronting North-South and Christian-Muslim divides. Periodic attacks on oil pipelines and facilities in the Niger Delta have already affected world oil prices, while widespread bank robberies blamed on Boko Haram undermine Nigeria’s economic growth. Improving human security will lead to economic improvement.

Economic stability will in turn allow industrialized countries to cultivate greater investment in the region, which is sustaining 4 percent to 7 percent growth (with the exception of Niger at 2.5 percent), despite the lingering consequences of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. While U.S. foreign direct investment in these four countries remains predominantly in the oil and mining sectors, the region represents a significant future market for goods and services. Two-way trade between the United States and Nigeria totaled more than $34 billion in 2010, and American foreign direct investment reached $5.4 billion in 2009, making the United States the largest foreign investor in Nigeria.

Moreover, Nigeria is already a critical partner in advancing U.S. humanitarian goals. The nation’s involvement in six U.N. peace operations in Africa significantly reduces the burden on the United States in responding to regional crises.

As these countries’ economies grow and diversify, they will be in a much stronger position to manage slow- and sudden-onset climate disasters, associated migration, and potential conflict. U.S. policy supporting these efforts in the region will have to balance the need for security and reform, such that these aspects are mutually reinforcing; too great a focus on either aspect will risk instability undermining reform or loss of credibility rendering security impossible.

The arc of tension begins in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state. Nigerians are already seeing early signs of climate change in a rising sea level, more frequent flooding, and outbreaks of disease in the southern megacity of Lagos, home to more than 10 million people. In the northern part of the country, expanding desertification—which refers to the degradation of land productivity in dry land areas—has caused 200 villages to disappear.

These opposing pressures, driven by climate change, are expected to push internal migrants toward the center of Nigeria. At the same time a rapidly growing and increasingly urban population is seeking greater economic opportunities. The combination of these demographic trends and economic aspirations spur many Nigerians to move north. Existing international migration routes link people leaving Nigeria to Niger, where they cross into the Maghreb states and potentially Europe.

Human mobility and climate change in Nigeria occur amid serious threats to national and local governance. The southern Niger Delta has supported an insurgency since the 1990s, driven in part by anger with corruption and the mismanagement of the profits from the region’s booming oil industry. In the northern part of the country, religious tensions have turned violent, with more than 800 people having been killed in the central Nigerian city of Jos since January 2011. Boko Haram has undertaken attacks of increasing violence, including the U.N. bombing, and is behind a string of more than 100 armed bank robberies targeting lenders in north. A Christmas Day 2011 bombing outside Abuja killed more than 40 Christian worshippers, provoking a brutal police crackdown.

Although the unrest in the Niger Delta and the violence in the north are geographically distinct, they both have their roots in underlying dissatisfaction with a government that has failed to sustain an inclusive, accountable, and transparent state. As the effects of climate change worsen, even more will be demanded of Nigeria’s limited governance capacity.

Migrants from Nigeria and other sub-Saharan states who reach Niger, the second link in the arc of tension, enter one of Africa’s most desperate states. Niger has the world’s second highest fertility rate and a median age of only 15 years. Most of the booming population is dependent on rain-fed agriculture, but acreage of arable land has decreased dramatically over the past 50 years, and frequent droughts have impoverished and indebted many Nigeriens. In 2010 a severe drought left 7.1 million Nigeriens without adequate food. Climate change is expected to make the country hotter and more prone to drought, erosion, and loss of forested land, exacerbating already difficult conditions.

Niger also faces ongoing international and internal migration. Due to pressures from desertification and drought, some Nigerien pastoralists have shifted their migratory routes southwards into Nigeria in search of animal fodder and better grazing. In addition, unusual flooding in 2010 damaged many homes and farmland, creating an internal refugee situation and prompting other Nigeriens to seek shelter and employment in Nigeria, Libya, and the Ivory Coast.

Agadez, the largest city in northern Niger, is a key waypoint for sub-Saharan migrants moving north, and a hotspot on the arc of tension. While estimates of the number transiting the country on this path are scarce, some research indicates that at least 65,000 Sub-Saharan migrants passed through Niger toward Algeria and Libya in 2003 alone. About half of these migrants are thought to come from the underdeveloped central and southern parts of Nigeria.

Niger also faces a difficult security situation, including conflict over rangeland and water wells in the southeast and the north (especially near the Malian border), mineral-related conflict in the north, and the pervasive threat of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. In northern Agadez, home to the world’s second-largest uranium mine, a 2007 drought-driven rebellion by the Tuareg people led the government to dispatch 4,000 troops.

Additionally, Niger is within the range of operations of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which is known to engage in kidnapping and drug trafficking in the broader region. Agricultural and pastoral livelihoods have been made more difficult by the effects of climate change; this has translated to increasing numbers of disenfranchised youth, who security experts believe are more easily recruited to assist Al Qaeda in return for money and food.

Furthermore, some of the effects of climate change, such as desertification and flooding, are thought to benefit Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb by depopulating rural areas in which the group can then operate more freely. The Nigerien government has reorganized its security services in the hope of encouraging Nigerians not to engage in violent acts; however, the government has been accused of being incompetent or even unwilling to take action even when information about Al Qaeda is received.

Algeria is the third link in the arc of tension. Like much of the Maghreb region, Algeria faces a future made increasingly difficult by the effects of climate change, including increasing temperatures, decreasing rainfall, and a rising sea level. Water is of particular concern—the country already ranks second among African states in terms of water scarcity—as is desertification.

Additionally, climate variability in sub-Saharan Africa has the potential to indirectly affect Algeria by contributing to migration along the arc of tension and other migratory paths. The southern spread of the Sahara Desert is already thought to contribute to seasonal migration from sub-Saharan Africa toward Algeria and the Maghreb.

Algeria experienced a decade of internal violence in the 1990s. This conflict gave rise to the terrorist organization that eventually became Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Although violence has declined significantly since the early 2000s, Algeria has still experienced close to 1,000 incidents of political violence since the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York City and Washington, including kidnappings and high-profile bombings. Large ungoverned spaces and poor border controls allow migrants to move north from Niger, but also create space in which groups such as Al Qaeda can operate. Tamanrasset, a major way station for migrants in southern Algeria, is the new home of a joint military command center between Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger, which is meant to confront the threat from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The arc of tension ends in Morocco, historically one of Africa’s most stable states. Like Algeria, water shortage due to climate change is a serious concern in Morocco. Rainfall is projected to decrease by roughly 20 percent by the end of the century, according to a range of projections. The country faces a rising sea level along the coast, including in agricultural areas in the north, which may lead to increasing salinity in freshwater aquifers. With 44 percent of the country’s workforce engaged in agriculture, this development poses a fundamental challenge to the current Moroccan economy. Ultimately, the shifting climate may result in internal migration, forcing rural populations to move in search of more fertile land and eroding the geographic separation of ethnic groups.

Morocco is also under pressure from existing flows of international migrants, many of whom enter the country in an attempt to continue on to Europe. Two Spanish enclaves on the Mediterranean coast, Ceuta and Melilla, are key destinations for Africans seeking to enter the European Union. In 2005 efforts by hundreds of migrants to break through the fences surrounding the enclaves led to several deaths and resulted in the erection of more sophisticated border fences. While the impetus for migration into Morocco is difficult to determine with precision, researchers focused on the country point to decreasing rain and lower crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa as a factor in the decision to migrate.

The same enclaves that have attracted migrants seeking a chance to enter Europe have also drawn the attention of Al Qaeda. In 2006 Ayman al-Zawahiri, then Al Qaeda’s second in command, called for the liberation of Ceuta and Melilla. Thus far the terrorist network has reportedly not been successful in carrying out an attack in Morocco. An April 2011 café bombing, however, bore the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation. In January 2011 the Moroccan government arrested 27 alleged Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb members along the border with the Western Sahara.

What policymakers can do about this arc of tension

The overlapping challenges of climate change, migration, and security in these four nations pose a critical and complex problem for policymakers. While it is difficult to draw a direct line of causality from specific climate change hazards to the decision to migrate or to a particular conflict, the interrelationships between these factors mean that viewing and addressing them in isolation is no longer sufficient.

Indeed, this particular nexus demands policy solutions that cut across levels of governance and drive the U.S. government to synthesize traditionally distinct fields such as defense, diplomacy, and development. These new, complex challenges will force the United States and the international community to finally break from a Cold War-era understanding of security and move toward a more individual-based concept of human security.

At a policy level, the Obama administration’s first National Security Strategy document in 2010 prioritized conflict prevention, peacekeeping, counterterrorism, access to markets, and the protection of “carbon sinks” (places in nature that absorb carbon out of the atmosphere) in Africa, while the 2011 National Military Strategy emphasized security partnerships in the Trans-Sahel region. These current efforts are limited and not yet institutionalized, and still do not fully incorporate the environmental realities underlying the challenges to the region.

Overall, U.S. foreign assistance to the region is approximately $668 million. Nigeria receives $614 million, primarily for health and police training; Algeria $2.5 million, for counterterrorism and military training; Niger $17 million, mostly for food aid; and Morocco $35 million, for military and development assistance.

Internationally, the International Monetary Fund currently has no loans to the four countries. Algeria has accepted equity investments and loans totaling $82 million from the International Finance Corporation, the equity investment arm of the World Bank, but no loans from the World Bank itself. Nigeria has $4 billion in outstanding loans to the World Bank, including its cheapest lending arm, the International Development Association, with 2011 loans close to half a billion dollars aimed at stoking economic growth and employment in non-oil sectors.

The World Bank maintains a total commitment of $1.5 billion in Morocco and plans to disburse $200 million more in 2012 in investment lending. In addition, the bank has disbursed nearly $1.6 billion to Niger, including $70 million in 2010 and $41 million in 2011. And the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency is currently mobilizing $1 billion in insurance capacity for the Middle East and North Africa, including Morocco, to ensure that foreign direct investment in the region does not suffer because of the nearby Arab Spring revolutions.

Lastly, the U.S. military’s counterterrorism commitment to the region was bolstered by the creation of African Command, or AFRICOM, in 2008, tasked with developing the region’s professional military capabilities. In 2006 the United States allocated $500 million for the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership to train and equip African armed forces, including the four states in this report.

These are the traditional instruments of development and security, but the conversation about national security and military strategy in the United States is changing. With the U.S. government facing at least several years of austerity budgets, defense and foreign affairs spending will not escape the cuts unscathed. If properly executed, budget cuts could pare down unnecessary spending in the United States’ massive defense budget (now larger than at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War buildup), while protecting the core defense, diplomacy, and development capabilities needed to confront complex crises.

If mishandled, though, the cuts could have a dramatic impact on nonmilitary international affairs funding. Rebalancing and reorienting these capabilities will help the United States create more effective and efficient programs in countries like Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, and Morocco. The United States cannot hope to encourage stable, fair, and effective governance if we continue to understaff and underfund our civilian aid and foreign-affairs capabilities. Thus, a thorough review of the relationship between defense, diplomacy, and development is required. The division of labor between these three branches of our foreign and security policy establishment must be adapted to a new and rapidly changing post-Cold War environment.

This report examines the arc of tension to understand how prepared we are to achieve this new balance. Through analysis of the climate, migration, and security factors outlined above, it lays out a series of recommendations to reorient U.S. and international policy. These recommendations are also intended to inform the transatlantic and multilateral conversation on the climate, migration, and security nexus. Briefly, we recommend a new approach.

Niger and Nigeria are rarely discussed in conjunction with Algeria and Morocco. The first two countries are usually considered separately, as part of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb, respectively. The United States pursues very different forms of engagement, development assistance, and diplomacy with each of these countries, despite existing migratory flows that link all four nations. We argue that this practice is outdated.

Secondly, the nexus of climate change, migration, and conflict produces pressure points that need comprehensive regional approaches. From a regional perspective, and based upon four case studies, we highlight priority issues facing the United States, the international community, and regional policy actors in addressing this unprecedented challenge and provide recommendations to shape the future of U.S. and international foreign assistance.

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Migration linked to climate change, a phenomenon that will “only become more pronounced in the coming years,” poses a growing humanitarian threat, said Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia Pacific.

The report, available in draft form last year, also said most migration in the region would be within national boundaries, and primarily from rural to urban areas. The movement, the bulk of which will involve poor people, is likely to be influenced by social, political and economic changes as well as climate pressures.

The report urged the region’s leaders to protect migrants, improve international cooperation on migrant issues, draw up more comprehensive systems to manage disaster risks, use migration as a tool to adapt to climate change and remove barriers to insurance schemes and remittances that help communities become more resilient.

“By taking actions today, governments can reduce the likelihood of future humanitarian crises” and maximise the possibilities that people can remain in their communities or, if they are forced to move, relocate to more secure places with livelihood options, the report noted.

“People have moved for environmental reasons since the beginning of time. What has changed lately is the policy awareness about it and also how much climate change aggravates this tendency,” said Dina Ionesco, migration policy officer for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), at the report’s launch in Bangkok.

According to IOM, currently there are around 200 million international migrants worldwide and over 700 million internal migrants, most of them economic migrants.

42 MILLION DISPLACED BY DISASTERS

Storms, floods and other extreme weather events in Asia Pacific displaced more than 42 million people in the past two years, a share of whom became migrants, either unable to return home or opting to relocate, the report said.

The figure does not include those who moved due to slow environmental changes such as desertification, rising sea levels or coastal erosions, problems nations like the the Maldives or Papua New Guinea in particular have suffered.

Numbers of migrants as a result of slow environmental changes are much harder to calculate, partly because such changes take place over a long period of time but also because they are less visible than sudden disasters which displace thousands overnight. However, experts also say these events tend to force people to move away more permanently.

Asia Pacific is already the region most prone to natural disasters, both in terms of the absolute number of disasters and the sheer number of people exposed (60 percent of the world’s population lives in the region).

Climate change is expected to worsen the natural disaster burden, bringing sea level rise, storm surges, flooding and water stress, and leaving more people displaced, at least temporarily.

The report identifies as Asian climate risk ‘hot spots’ booming megacities including Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, the densely populated low-lying coast of China, southern Pakistan, the deltas of the Mekong, Red and Irrawaddy rivers and the Pacific island states of Kiribati and Tuvalu.

While migration remains a controversial and sensitive issue, governments are realising the importance of a comprehensive migration and resettlement policy, said Bart W. Edes, the director of ADB’s division on poverty reduction, gender and social development.

“I think we’re aided in part by the reality around what we’re seeing – disasters after disasters,” he told AlertNet.

In the Philippines, where ADB is based, a typhoon hit northern Mindanao – an area previously not affected by typhoons – in December, killing more than 1,000 people and leaving tens of thousands displaced.

REMITTANCES FOR RESILIENCE

Coming demographic changes will bring more attention to migration in general, Edes added, and some of the solutions could be applicable to climate-induced migration. He pointed to Japan, which has signed bilateral agreements with Indonesia and Philippines to bring nurses to the country to fill gaps in the labour force left by an aging population.

“This is a practical example, in Asia, of a country that is not famous for being a big land of immigration and yet they have found it their self-interest (to do this),” he said.

The report also stressed the importance of remittances in helping communities deal with climate change and urged for fees surrounding remittances to be lowered.

“Remittances play a massive role in building resilience,” Edes said. In Bangladesh, the Philippines, Tajikistan, and Cambodia, they are “improving livelihoods, diversifying income (and) helping provide a buffer against economic shocks whether environmentally-caused or not.”

And the report singled out AfatVimo, a micro-insurance scheme in India, which covers damage or loss through 19 kinds of disasters, including floods, cyclones, lightning strikes and landslides, as an example of how to build resilience against climate impacts. The annual premium is about $4.50 with a total potential benefit of $1,560.

Migration itself is a crucial means of adapting to climate change, and ultimately affected communities should be allowed to choose to migrate, said IOM’s Ionesco.

“Migration can create alternative livelihoods for people. It can really be part of the solution if it’s well managed, well-planned, well-thought-out and well-integrated in other policies, such as humanitarian, development, adaptation and climate change policies,” she said.

“The idea is to plan and forecast this migration that can be foreseen so it’s not forced, (so) it remains a choice.”

Source: AlertNet

The land is wanted for crops, to settle some Kiribati farmers and to extract earth for sea defences, reports say.

Some of Kiribati’s 32 coral atolls, which straddle the equator, are already disappearing beneath the ocean.

None of the atolls rises more than a few metres above the sea level.

‘Last resort’

Fiji, which is more than 2,000km (1,300 miles) away, is one of a number of countries that Kiribati hopes its population may be able to move to in the future.

The chairman of Fiji’s Real Estate Agents Licensing Board, Colin Sibary, said he was facilitating talks between Kiribati officials and a Fijian freeholder who owns the land on Vanua Levu.

“I’ve been working very hard on this for Kiribati for a year,” Mr Sibary told the BBC.

“After the purchase they will formalise a development plan which will include various farms to produce vegetables, fruit and meat for export to Kiribati.”

He said Kiribati officials also hoped to bring barges into Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island, to take away landfill to help stop encroachment by the sea in Kiribati.

At most, he thought 500 Kiribati inhabitants might end up living on Vanua Levu, involved in farming and working on the landfill project.

“There is no thought of moving them all,” he said.

President Tong said climate change was a daily battle for Kiribati, but has admitted it is one his country would ultimately lose.

He said moving the Kiribati population would be a “last resort” to save the more than 100,000 islanders.

Relocating the entire population would be a monumental challenge, says the BBC’s Phil Mercer in Sydney.

Kiribati’s officials hope that many people would also be allowed to settle in other countries in the vast region, including Australia and New Zealand.

Previously, Mr Tong suggested constructing man-made islands resembling oil rigs for people to live on.

Source: BBC News

(via Forced Migration Current Awareness)

More interestingly, “in the case of married couples, women do not migrate. This is a case of household, not individual, strategies, in which, due to traditional gender roles, men are the ones who must respond to adverse economic impacts from climate change by migrating.” Although, “single mothers are the women most likely to migrate in response to climate change, since they must generate income to maintain their families. The loss of income from economic depression forces them to migrate in search of work, and the same is true for many young women who provide economic support to their parents.”

From this study, we can see that responses to climate change are very household and community-based. In a livelihoods system like that of Africa, where some 80 percent of agricultural output is led by women, migration might be a much more common response, especially given the migration patterns seen by men/agricultural workers in Mexico. More studies would be needed in each impacted community in order to determine truly the differences in migration for men and women.

For further reference: In 2009, Lori M. Hunter and Emmanuel Davis of the University of Colorado, Boulder wrote a working paper on “Climate Change and Migration: Considering the Gender Dimensions,” where they looked at potential ways in which climate change may differentially shape both migration’s cause and consequence by gender. They used a livelihoods framework, in which they believed there were “two pathways through which climate change’s gendered migration impacts may manifest: 1) shifts in proximate natural resources and agricultural potential, as well as 2) increases in extreme weather events.”

Again, we see that the study of gendered migration is nuanced. Hunter and Davis acknowledge that extreme weather events might impact migration differently for men and women, and not just slow-onset impacts like that of drought, which the Mexico study focuses on.

In sum, there remain more questions than answers. Regardless, both of the studies above should be read and re-read in order to begin to “gain the nuance understanding necessary to inform policy mitigating climate change’s impacts,” as Hunter and Davis write.