The 25-year-old woman is one of thousands of native people who migrate every year from the municipality of Tlapa and its surroundings in the southern state of Guerrero, to pick fruit and vegetables in the north of the country.

Tlapa, one of the poorest places in Mexico, is ravaged by deforestation, intermittent drought and torrential rains, so that farming is not an economically viable occupation for local people.

Regions like Tlapa illustrate the possible relationship between climate change and migration, an issue that is coming under scrutiny in Mexico, a country that is vulnerable to the effects of phenomena like prolonged droughts, soil degradation, devastating rainstorms, lack of water and rising sea levels.

“Migration patterns are changing as a result of climate change which is having increasing impacts. In a number of states, more people are emigrating,” Andrea Cerami, a lawyer with the independent Mexican Centre for Environmental Law (CEMDA), told IPS.

Together with factors like poverty, lack of job opportunities and high crime rates, environmental degradation has become an additional element driving migration, both within the country and abroad.

Every year some 500,000 people emigrate from Mexico to the United States, where some eight million Mexicans are living without the necessary legal documents, according to specialist agencies.

The National Institute for Statistics and Geography reports that the areas receiving the largest numbers of internal migrants are Mexico City, the western state of Jalisco, Baja California on the border with the United States, and the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, while the centre, south and mid-west of the country are the major sources of migrants.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines environmental migrants as “persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad.”

“Climate change isn’t necessarily people’s main reason for leaving,” Patricia Romero Lankao of the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told IPS. “They leave in search of job opportunities that are not available in their places of origin, and because they have a network of contacts. Climate change is still not the chief reason, but it does play a part.”

Romero Lankao and her colleagues Hua Qin and Melissa Haeffner are working on a research project titled “Displacement or Adaptation? Climate Change and Migration in Mexico”, presented in June at an international conference in Oslo on Climate Change and Displacement in the 21st Century.

In 2010 and the first half of 2011, Mexico as a whole suffered intense drought, while in the south and southeast torrential rains and flooding destroyed crops, human settlements and infrastructure.

Four powerful hurricanes have struck the country since 2005, leaving 650,000 Mexicans homeless, while floods displaced 500,000 people between 2003 and 2010, according to the NCAR research project.

Several recent research studies appear to have identified a link between climate phenomena and the movement of people in Mexico.

In their study presented this year, “The Environmental Dimensions of Emigration from Rural Mexico”, Lori Hunter, Sheena Murray and Fernando Riosmena of the University of Colorado at Boulder found that “households subjected to drought conditions are far more likely to send a migrant as compared to those subjected to wet conditions.”

The scientists examined data collected between 1987 and 2005 from 24,132 households comprising a total of 117,040 people, from 66 rural communities in 12 different states.

They found substantial variation in rainfall patterns, with approximately 23 percent of the sample subjected to drought in the year of the survey.

Moreover, 13 percent of the sample suffered drought the year before the survey, and 3.6 percent were subject to drought in both the previous and the survey years.

Close to 28 percent experienced heavy rainfall in the survey year, while 23 percent had suffered a deluge in the previous year, and seven percent in both.

Meanwhile Shuaizhang Feng, Alan Krueger and Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University in the U.S. state of New Jersey concluded that a 10 percent reduction in crop yields in Mexico leads an additional two percent of the population to emigrate. By approximately the year 2080, they estimated climate change would induce 1.4 to 6.7 million Mexicans to emigrate to the United States, because of declines in agricultural productivity.

Their research paper “Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico-U.S. cross-border migration” was published in 2010 in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

By 2050 there could be a worldwide total of 200 million people who have migrated for environmental reasons, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that reviews evidence related to global warming.

The categories of “environmental migrant” or “climate change refugee” are not included in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, nor in the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees.

“Because measures to adapt to climate change have not been adopted by the Mexican state, people in this country who are adversely affected will have to move away and migrate, primarily to the United States,” CEMDA’s Cerami predicted.

“Mexico will be a very important laboratory. The empirical evidence we have reviewed tells us that, droughts and all, what causes farmers to leave their homes is markets and opportunities,” said Romero Lankao, whose work at NCAR uses a model that links the vulnerability of communities, capital, and life opportunities with migration. “Circular migration, where people eventually return to their communities, is more interesting, and deserves more research,” she said.

“We have to migrate, because there is no food, and no money,” said Santiago, who first became a migrant when she was seven years old and is now the mother of a four-year-old son. Her own mother was run over in mid-August on a road in the northern state of Chihuahua during the chili pepper harvest. (END)

As always, caveats abound. The social consequences of global warming are always the hardest things to predict. Immigration rates are never driven by physics alone, but depend on plenty of other factors, such as U.S. border policies or the changing structure of Mexico’s economy. And it’s always difficult to tie specific social trends to climate change. People in rural areas have been migrating for a long time, whether to seek out work or because the rainfall’s dried up or the soil’s eroded. Global warming will exacerbate these pressures, yes, but it’s hard to attribute any single event—or single migrant—to man-made climate change. That’s one reason why forecasts of “climate refugees” vary so wildly.

Still, climate-driven migration is a concept that’s received a lot of attention in recent years. As the planet heats up, droughts spread, and sea levels rise, millions of people are going to be uprooted from their homes and farms and move elsewhere. According to a 2007 World Bank report, the vast bulk of this migration is expected to take place within developing countries, with people moving from rural villages to urban centers. One big concern here is that places like Lagos or Dhaka are already swelling exponentially, and their infrastructure can barely keep up, which is why so many “megacities” now sport massive slums.

But there’s also likely to be a fair amount of migration between countries—and the consequences there are much harder to predict. As the rising oceans chomp away at Bangladesh, for instance, as many as 15 million people may have to abandon their towns and villages by mid-century. Partly in response, India has been constructing a 2,100-mile long fence to barricade itself against the predicted influx of climate refugees. This old Greenwire piece by Lisa Friedman features a number of national security experts in India openly fretting about how rising seas will destabilize the borders between the two countries.

There are even consequences for Western politics. Over in Europe, a variety of ultra-right-wing nativist groups take these climate-migration forecasts very seriously. In his excellent book Forecast, Stephan Faris talked to members of Britain’s BNP, which is trying (unsuccessfully) to forge an alliance with greens. A lot of them rant on about how immigration is terrible for the environment, since a person’s carbon footprint swells when he or she moves from a poor country to a rich country. Similarly, in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front has started hitting on environmental themes of late. Few actual environmentalists want anything to do with these parties, and there doesn’t seem to be anything comparable in the United States, though if global warming does put pressure on immigration, it’s certainly possible that green nativists could find a toehold here.

Source: The New Republic

Seasonal winds, storms and high tides combine to submerge the tiny islands, crowded with huts of yellow cane and faded palm fronds, leaving them ankle-deep in emerald water for days on end.

Pablo Preciado, leader of the island of Carti Sugdub, remembers that in his childhood floods were rare, brief and barely wetted his toes. “Now it’s something else. It’s serious,” he said.

The increase of a few inches in flood depth is consistent with a global sea level rise over Preciado’s 64 years of life and has been made worse by coral mining by the islanders that reduced a buffer against the waves.

Carti Sugdub is one of a handful of islands in an archipelago off Panama’s northeastern coast, where the government says climate change threatens the livelihood of nearly half of the 32,000 semi-autonomous Kuna people.

The 2,000 inhabitants of Carti Sugdub plan to move to coastal areas within the Kuna’s autonomous territory on the Panama mainland. They are eyeing foothills a half-hour walk from the swampy beach areas.

“The water level is rising. The move is imminent,” said Preciado, who has been leading a group of villagers clearing tropical forest for the new settlement.

World leaders have failed so far to reach a global accord to curb the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change. A U.N. climate change conference later this year in Mexico aims to make progress toward a binding agreement.

If the islanders abandon their homes as planned, the exodus will be one of the first blamed on rising sea levels and global warming.

Scientists warn that sea level rise in the next century could threaten millions with a similar fate and some communities as far apart as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji have already been forced to relocate

“This is no longer about a scientist saying that climate change and the change in sea level will flood (a people) and affect them,” said Hector Guzman, a marine biologist and coral specialist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “This is happening now in the real world.”

Climate Change Refugees

The fiercely independent Kuna, famed for rebellions against Spanish conquistadors, French pirates and Panamanian overlords, have accelerated their fate by mining coral, which they use to expand islands and build artificial islets and breakwaters.

Guzman, based at a Pacific island research center on the edge of Panama City, has warned of the risks of coral mining for a decade but says speaking out against a legally permitted traditional activity is “taboo.”

“(The Kuna) have increased their vulnerability to storms, wave action, and above all, the action of the rise in sea level,” he told Reuters.

When Kuna speak in their native language the Spanish words for “climate change” are often among the few foreign words used. While some elders warn that sea level rise will get worse, many locals believe God will keep them safe.

“I don’t know where they get that from — that the land is going to sink and we’d better leave before it happens … Those who want to go, can go. I’m staying here,” said Evangelina, 60, who would not give her last name because she hasn’t told local leadership she’s opposed to moving.

Sea levels rose about 17 cm (about 7 inches) over the last century and experts say the rate is accelerating. In 2007, the United Nations predicted a rise of 18 to 59 cm (7-23 inches) by 2100 but that did not include the accelerated melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that seas could rise 2 meters (6.5 feet) by the end of the century, threatening millions of people in cities from Tokyo and Shanghai to New Orleans.

“It’s something you’re going to be seeing more and more,” said Albert Binger, the scientific adviser to the 42-member Alliance of Small Island States, referring to potential victims as “climate change refugees.”

Binger said the Kuna’s coral extraction is a portent for what climate change has in store for other low-lying islands protected by reefs. The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide makes oceans more acidic, killing coral struggling to survive in warmer seas.

Slow Move

While Kuna leaders say their move from cool breezy islands to stuffy forests is imminent, progress has been slow so far and the government does not have a support plan in place.

Carti Sugdub’s islanders have used machetes to carve out a patch of tropical forest but lack machinery to clear the land.

Leaders at nearby Carti Mulatupu are working on an environmental impact study for their move. They reckon setting up a mainland community for 600 people could cost $5 million.

The Panamanian government, which supports the islanders financially by paying for health clinics, schools and poverty programs, has done little to support the relocation plans but officials back the idea.

“Sometimes the community is flooded up to the knees,” said Helen Perez, the schoolmaster at Carti Mulatupu, as his 120 students ran around a sandy school yard by an eroded concrete pier. “The community has taken the decision to move to land.”

Chani Morris, an 82-year-old fisherman, is ready to abandon the islet of Coibita he helped build out of coral 33 years ago. He said he doesn’t sleep well since a flood engulfed the island, destroyed huts and carried away dugout canoes.

“The sea is very bothersome, sometimes it scares me at night,” said Morris, as he fashioned fish traps out of chicken wire. “I’m just waiting for the others to decide when we can move and I’m going to go with them.”

Source: Reuters

Location of the community of Igarape do Costa. Photo credit: WWF-Brazil

The World Wildlife Fund established the Climate Prep blog to “define climate change adaptation through illustrations of on the ground adaptation projects and scientific adaptation studies, explorations of adaptation concepts, and tracking firsthand the progress of adaptation in the international policy arena.”

This is especially pertinent to the field of climate change-induced migration, as the more preventative measures are taken the less impact climate change should have on migration. A great illustration of the climate’s impact on migration can already be seen in Brazil, where the recent blog post “Building Climate Adaptation Capacity in Amazon Floodplain Communities” claims “many people are migrating in the Santarém region from lake to lake in search of fish.” The post from Climate Prep is cross-posted below.

(Climate Prep) February 12, 2010 – Located in the lower Amazon floodplain of Brazil, the Santarém region harbors important fisheries that many people depend on for employment, food security, government tax revenues, and items to export to both domestic and foreign markets. Climate change is creating difficulties, but not without hope and new opportunities as well.

These fisheries and the services that they provide are known to be sensitive to shifts in the climate. Precipitation patterns are shifting in the Santarém region, with the amount of annual rainfall generally decreasing and floods and droughts becoming more common. Livelihoods for most people around these lakes combine farming and fishing, both of which will be negatively affected by a reduction in rainfall. Less rain will have an especially big impact on the local economy through the quantity of fish that are locally harvested. If regional climate forecasts are accurate, rural livelihoods in lakeshore regions will become increasingly precarious over time.

Because of these shifts in climate, many people are migrating in the Santarém region from lake to lake in search of fish. And more people are even moving from rural regions to cities and other areas of greater economic opportunity. The rate people leave their traditional homes will probably increase as rainfall becomes increasingly variable.

Conflicts also arise over the governance of floodplain resources that so many individuals around Santarém depend on. The issue of how to determine rights to resources in lakes and rivers throughout the region is increasingly contentious.  Should they be monitored and regulated by the state control, or should communities decide how and when fish are harvested? Or should all of these decisions be settled by individuals? So far, neither the state nor the market has been uniformly successful in solving common-pool resource problems. While access to certain “subsistence lakes” is restricted to rural, local communities, the establishment of formal regulation of open-access resources such as fisheries may be an important means to avoid over-exploitation and the resulting degradation of the resource base, in the same way that many harvests of wild species are regulated through hunting or fishing permits globally.

The community of Igarapé do Costa is located on a low sandbank, surrounded by three floodplain lakes called Pacoval, Aramanaí, and Itarim (Figure 1). About 90 families depend on fishing, small gardens and farms, and cattle ranching. Of these, fishing is the main productive activity for 94% of families (Figure 2). During the rainy season, the sandbank is covered by the waters of the Pacoval and Aramanaí lakes, linking the Amazon river and the community. But during the dry season the community is cut off by a massive sandbank and the lakes shrink in size, leaving them 5 km (3 miles) from the mainstream of the river, which is their source of water, transportation, and sustenance. The decreasing amounts of rainfall — especially during drought years — mean that the periods when these communities are separated from the mainstream of the river are getting longer.

The lives of the people of Igarapé do Costa are typical of many people in the Amazon floodplain, especially those located in low sandbanks, far from upland on the banks of river. The key aspect of the Amazon that has determined the ways of life for these communities is the dependable flood pulse that comes every year. Like a clock, it helps regulate the fish species of the Amazon, and the fish regulate the traditional livelihoods and economy for millions of people.

Changes in the rain result in changes in the flood pulse, which alters seasonal fishmovement between the river’s mainstem and the surrounding lakes and wetlands and disrupts the livelihoods of the people. These characteristics make the record of the environmental aspects of climate change and responses of the community´s floodplain a critical element for social environmental sustainability in the region in the coming decades. The implementation of the Climate Witness Project in the community of Igarapé do Costa gives an important contribution to the generation of knowledge.

In my future entries I will present results of the Climate Witness Project that has been implemented in the community of Igarapé do Costa and Santarém region. My analysis considers the study of environmental and social adaptations to climate change at the local level in light of the inherent variability of floodplain ecosystems and the community’s capacity for adaptation.

Source: Climate Prep

Environmental Refugees or Economic Migrants?

As the evidence for global environmental change has accumulated over the past decade, academics, policymakers, and the media have given more attention to the issue of “environmental refugees.” A major concern is whether environmental change will displace large numbers of vulnerable people in the developing world, particularly from rural areas where livelihoods are especially dependent on climate and natural resources. A widely cited article estimated that more than 25 million people were displaced by environmental factors in 1995.¹ Skeptics, however, derided these numbers as speculation.² In fact, despite dozens of academic publications and several international conferences on the issue, well-documented cases of environmentally induced migration are largely limited to dramatic events such as Hurricane Katrina in the United States and the creation of the Three Gorges Dam in China.³ The still unclear consequences of smaller-scale but more pervasive forms of environmental change such as droughts and soil degradation limit our ability to predict the scale and nature of future human displacements under accelerating global environmental change. However, new research shows that environmentally induced migration can be temporary and involve relatively short distances, in contrast to fears of large numbers of environmental refugees moving across international borders.

Demographic Studies of Migration in Ecuador and Indonesia

Migrants respond to economic, social, and demographic factors in addition to the environment. Assessing environmental influences on migration is complex and must take these other factors into account. Research on migration and the environment has also been limited by the lack of appropriate data sets and by disciplinary boundaries between migration studies and environmental science. Recently, however, studies by Sabine Henry, Douglas Massey, myself, and others have used approaches from demographic studies of migration, often in combination with Geographic Information Systems, to overcome these challenges. These studies link individual-level data on migration to local characteristics of the environment, then analyze the migration process using multivariate statistical models. This approach represents a significant advance over both small-scale case studies and country-level analyses.

Two studies by myself and colleagues have applied this approach in Ecuador and Indonesia. In Ecuador, I collected survey data from 400 households and constructed a database that addresses the influence of local environmental conditions on migration.⁴ The study region in the southern Ecuadorian Andes is prone to droughts and is an important center of out-migration to internal and international destinations. These data show that communities with adverse environmental conditions (low rainfall and steep slopes) sent more migrants to nearby destinations but fewer migrants to distant and international destinations. This pattern is inconsistent with the environmental refugees narrative that predicts large-scale migration over long distances, but is consistent with previous studies. For example, in Burkina Faso, rainfall variability increased internal migration but decreased international migration; and in Nepal, local environmental degradation increased short-distance moves but not long-distance moves.⁵

In Indonesia, I am participating in the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery, which has collected a unique survey dataset in the region affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In each year since the tsunami, this project has tracked and reinterviewed 10,000 households in Aceh and North Sumatra who were first interviewed in the February 2004 round of the Indonesian National Socioeconomic Survey. Together with colleagues I am using this dataset to examine population displacement following the tsunami.⁶ Our results indicate that, as expected, the tsunami led to high rates of displacement in damaged communities. However, contrary to expectations, most of the displaced remained in or near their origin community, a large proportion stayed with friends or family rather than entering camps, and many returned to their homes within a few months after the tsunami. Vulnerable populations such as the poor were no more likely to be displaced than others.

Most Environmental Migrants Move Short Distances

These are only two studies, but the picture they paint of environmentally induced migration is quite different from the dramatic images conjured by the term “environmental refugees”: Most environmental migrants moved short distances, adverse environmental conditions can actually reduce migration, and vulnerable populations are not necessarily more likely to be displaced. How to explain these results? Migration theory and geography provide some insights. First, a large number of studies have shown that individuals who are educated or better-off are more likely to migrate, due to the costs of migration and greater rewards for the educated. This fact suggests that environmental degradation might reduce migration, particularly to distant destinations, by reducing access to the resources needed to migrate. Second, if the environmental conditions that migrants are responding to vary on a small scale, then a local move might be enough to encounter better conditions or alternative livelihood opportunities.

However, neither of these perspectives is consistent with a view of vulnerable environmental refugees fleeing degradation over long distances or international borders. Instead, the narrative derives from a neo-Malthusian perspective in which vulnerable populations are assumed to have limited capacity to cope with adverse environmental conditions. This school of thought has been largely rejected by social scientists working on related human-environment issues and appears to have little explanatory power in this case.⁷

Our current limited understanding doesn’t allow us to predict with any clarity how migration might respond to future climate change. Large-scale natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami displace large numbers of people and the frequency of such events is likely to rise. The Indonesian case illustrates that even extreme events do not necessarily lead to an international refugee crisis. The consequences of more pervasive forms of environmental change such as droughts and soil degradation are less certain, but current research indicates that they are also unlikely to lead to large-scale movements of long-distance migrants. These studies make clear that environmentally induced migration is real and deserves to be on the international agenda, but simplistic views of massive numbers of “environmental refugees” moving across borders should be set aside.

1. Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees: A Growing Phenomenon of the 21st Century,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 357, no. 1420 (2002): 609-13.
2. Richard Black, “Environmental Refugees: Myth or Reality?” Working Paper No. 34, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2001).
3. Jeffrey Groen and Anne Polivka, “Hurricane Katrina Evacuees: Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They Are Faring,” Monthly Labor Review 131, no. 3 (2008): 32-51; and Li Heming and Philip Rees, “Population Displacement in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area of the Yangtze River, Central China: Relocation Policies and Migrant Views,” International Journal of Population Geography 6, no. 6 (2000): 439-62.
4. Clark Gray, “Environment, Land and Rural Out-Migration in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes,” World Development 37, no. 2 (2009): 457-68.
5. Sabine Henry, Bruno Schoumaker, and Cris Beauchemin, “The Impact of Rainfall on the First Out-Migration: A Multi-Level Event-History Analysis in Burkina Faso,” Population and Environment 25, no. 5 (2004): 423-60; and Douglas Massey, William Axinn, and Dirgha Ghimire, “Environmental Change and Out-Migration: Evidence From Nepal,” Population Studies Center Research Report No. 07-615, University of Michigan (2007).
6. Clark Gray et al., “Tsunami-Induced Displacement in Sumatra, Indonesia,” paper presented at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population International Population Conference, Marrakech, Sept. 27-Oct. 2, 2009.
7. Melissa Leach and James Fairhead, “Challenging Neo-Malthusian Deforestation Analyses in West Africa’s Dynamic Forest Landscapes,” Population and Development Review 26, no. 1 (2000): 17-43; Henrik Urdal, “People vs. Malthus: Population Pressure, Environmental Degradation, and Armed Conflict Revisited,” Journal of Peace Research 42, no. 4 (2005): 417-34; and Eric Neumayer, “An Empirical Test of a Neo-Malthusian Theory of Fertility Change,” Population and Environment 27, no. 4 (2006): 327-36.

Source: Population Reference Bureau