In 2010, UNU-EHS and the MunichRe Foundation held a Summer Academy on “Protecting Environmental Migrants: Creating New Policy and Institutional Framework”, which aimed to develop policy options for decision makers to better address the needs of environmentally-induced migrants. The issue “Climate Change and Migration: Rethinking Policies for Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction” presents the outcomes of that Summer Academy and the selected papers of PhD students from different academic backgrounds. These papers cover various aspects of the complexity of protection issues for environmental migrants and analysis of current protection regimes. Using case studies conducted in both developing and developed countries, these papers identified legal and institutional gaps and explored possible policy options for decision makers.

Table of Contents
Section One: Improving National Governance and Regional Cooperation in Managing Displacement and Migration: Selected Case Studies

Rapid-Onset Disasters

• “Vulnerability and Population Displacements due to Climate-Induced Disasters in Coastal Bangladesh” by Dulal Chandra Roy
• “Community Resilience and Hurricane Ida: How Marginalized Salvadorans Lacking NGO and Governmental Support Cope with Climate Shock” by Elizabeth Tellman
• “United States Environmental Migration:Vulnerability, Resilience, and Policy Options for Internally Displaced Persons” by Michelle A. Meyer Lueck

Slow-Onset Disasters

• “Food Insecurity and Environmental Migration in Drought-Prone Areas of Ethiopia” by Aschale Dagnachew Siyoum
• “The Agulu-Nanka Gully Erosion Menace in Nigeria: What Does the Future Hold for Population at Risk?” by Chukwuedozie Kelechukwu Ajaero and Arinze Tagbo Mozie

Section Two: Improving International Law and Regional Cooperation on Migration to Enhance Development and Climate Change Adaptation: Selected Case Studies

• “Regional Labour Migration as Adaptation to Climate Change?: Options in the Pacific” by Fanny Thornton
• “Temporary Labour Migration for Victims of Natural Disasters: The Case of Columbia [sic]” by Nicole de Moor
• “Climate Change and Institutional Change in UNHCR” by Nina Hall

Read the full issue here.

Contents include the following:

• A Decision Framework for Environmentally Induced Migration
• Multidimensional Re-creation of Vulnerabilities and Potential for Resilience in International Migration
• The Thin Line Between Choice and Flight: Environment and Migration in Rural Benin
• North-South Migration in Ghana: What Role for the Environment?
• Economic or Environmental Migration? The Push Factors in Niger
• Flooding and Relocation: The Zambezi River Valley in Mozambique
• Western Sahara: Migration, Exile and Environment
• Environmental Degradation and Migration on Hispaniola Island
• Drought Triggered Temporary Migration in an East Indian Village
• Migration and Displacement Triggered by Floods in the Mekong Delta
• Contrasted Views on Environmental Change and Migration: the Case of Tuvaluan Migration to New Zealand

Download each article free here.

We would still be insulating buildings with cancer-causing asbestos and fuelling cars with lead additives, damaging babies’ brains. The circulation in fridges would also be done by chemicals that, by thinning the Earth’s protective ozone layer, would probably have led to a sharp increase in cases of skin cancer worldwide.

But this is not happening. In those cases, governments assessed the emerging science, consulted on the risks and accepted that the evidence outweighed the uncertainties.

Internationally, it is called the precautionary approach: you and I might call it acting responsibly, prudently or just being smart.

Climate change perhaps triggers some of the most polarised debate between precaution and those who say that without scientific perfection it is all just hot air.

This has re-surfaced in recent weeks over the issue of climate change and migration.

It has been sparked by a map, produced by a UNEP-collaborating centre in Norway, overlapping vulnerable areas of the globe and forecasts of climate impacts.

The map was linked to scientific projections, made in 2005, suggesting there might be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010.

Presenting complex data is a challenge for any public or private institution – in respect of migration, rising populations, unsustainable use of resources, poverty and civil war all contribute to vulnerability in the face of natural and weather-related disasters.

The science has moved on since 2005, as has the debate at about how best to classify people affected by natural hazards, either temporarily or permanently and within or across national borders.

Looked at today, the map over-simplifies the message, which is why we asked for it to be removed.

Yet the question remains – are there people being displaced by climate change, and what of the future?

These are questions that are likely to be high on nations’ minds when the UN security council debates climate change and security in July to review a growing body of informed opinion and evidence.

In 2008 analysts for the Pentagon in the US concluded that extreme weather events linked with climate change could lead to mass migration in some parts of the world.

This year the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the UK stated: “In areas with weak or brittle states, climate change will increase the risks of resource shortages, mass migrations and civil conflict.”

Some attempts, such as the 2005 estimate, have also been trying to put possible numbers on the likely numbers displaced.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) looked at the data for 2008.

The data suggests that at least 36 million people were displaced by “sudden-onset natural disasters”, of whom more than 20 million were displaced owing to the sudden onset of weather-related disasters, including about 6.5 million people because of floods in India.

“Research from other sources suggests that many millions of people are also displaced annually as a result of slow-onset climate-related disasters such as drought,” it adds.

Munich Re, the re-insurance company, recently concluded that in 2010 “The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures, both globally and in different regions of the world, provide further indications of advancing climate change.”

The company mentions the floods in Pakistan, where about a million people were displaced.

We could say with greater certainty that many victims of rising greenhouse gas emissions were already with us, if only the existing science was able to disentangle the climate signature from the other complexities and challenges many people across the world increasingly face.

The question we must continuously ask ourselves in the face of scientific complexity and uncertainty, but also growing evidence of climate change, is at what point precaution, common sense or prudent risk management demands action.

The role of institutions such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is to continuously review emerging science, subject it to careful peer review and ensure that it is available to public policymakers and, indeed, the public.

To declare a phenomenon such as climate change non-existent until we have unravelled all aspects of atmospheric science and impacts on the biosphere and on human beings would be reckless and irresponsible.

Although reviewing science is an integral part of knowledge generation, we should not allow the critique to paralyse emerging science on climate change from reaching society – especially when the lives and livelihoods of considerable numbers of people are at risk.

Achim Steiner is UN under-secretary general and executive director of UNEP

Source: The Guardian

I have posted before about the Environmental Justice Foundation which is a UK-based NGO working internationally to protect the natural environment and human rights. Their “Climate Refugees: No Place Like Home” campaign is dedicated to arguing the case of those displaced by climate climate change, putting the call to governments and our political leaders for a new agreement on environmental migrants.

Together with the Hay Festival Maldives, EJF has developed a collection of ideas from Heads of State, philosophers, explorers, scientists, lawyers, actors and experts in their field. These filmed discussions consider the potential cultural, emotional and physical impacts of forced migration, who should be responsible and what the potential options are for dealing with the impending human rights crisis (ejfoundation.org).

Click here to see the online discussion panel »

As author Sudhit Chella Rajan explains, “one of the main consequences of climate change will be rising seas, which will cause tens to hundreds of millions of people to be flooded out of their homes in coastal areas and in many low-lying atoll nations, some of which will become untenable as states or entirely disappear. This paper discusses disproportionate accumulation, delayed effects and asymmetrical impacts of greenhouse gases to advance ethical arguments concerning why and how the global community of nations should address the injustices caused by historic and continuing actions on climate migrants and climate exiles.”

As her book summary outlines:

Environmental migration is not new. Nevertheless, the events and processes accompanying global climate change threaten to increase human movement both within States and across international borders. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted an increased frequency and severity of climate events such as storms, cyclones and hurricanes, as well as longer-term sea level rise and desertification, which will impact upon people’s ability to survive in certain parts of the world.

This book brings together a variety of disciplinary perspectives on the phenomenon of climate-induced displacement. With chapters by leading scholars in their field, it collects in one place a rigorous, holistic analysis of this phenomenon, which can better inform academic understanding and policy development alike. Governments have not been prepared to take a leading role in developing responses to the issue, in large part due to the absence of strong theoretical frameworks from which sound policy can be developed. The specialist expertise of the authors in this book means that each chapter identifies key issues that need to be considered in shaping domestic, regional and international responses, including the complex causes of movement, the conceptualisation of migration responses to climate change, the terminology that should be used to describe those who move, and attitudes to migration that may affect decisions to stay or leave. The book will help to facilitate the creation of principled, research-based responses, and establish climate-induced displacement as an important aspect of both the climate change and global migration debates.

She includes chapters by familiar and influential migration, human rights, environmental, and legal scholars:

• “Climate Change-Induced Mobility and the Existing Migration Regime in Asia and the Pacific” by Graeme Hugo
• “Migration as Adaptation: Opportunities and Limits” by Jon Barnett and Michael Webber
• “Climate-Induced Community Relocation in the Pacific: The Meaning and Importance of Land” by John Campbell
• “Conceptualising Climate-Induced Displacement” by Walter Kälin
• “‘Disappearing States’, Statelessness and the Boundaries of International Law” by Jane McAdam
• “Protecting People Displaced by Climate Change: Some Conceptual Challenges” by Roger Zetter
• “International Ethical Responsibilities to ’Climate Change Refugees’” by Peter Penz
• “Climate Migration and Climate Migrants: What Threat, Whose Security?” by Lorraine Elliott
• “Climate-Related Displacement: Health Risks and Responses” by Anthony J McMichael, Celia E McMichael, Helen L Berry and Kathryn Bowen
• “Climate Change, Human Movement and the Promotion of Mental Health: What have we Learnt from Earlier Global Stressors?” by Maryanne Loughry
• “Afterword: What Now? Climate-Induced Displacement after Copenhagen” by Stephen Castles

We have yet to read the book, but it seems set to be an essential part of any climate change and migration reader’s diet.

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

Small Island Developing States are often depicted as being among the most vulnerable of all places to the effects of climate change, and they are a cause célèbre of many involved in climate science, politics and the media. Yet while small island developing states are much talked about, the production of both scientific knowledge and policies to protect the rights of these nations and their people has been remarkably slow.

This book is the first to apply a critical approach to climate change science and policy processes in the South Pacific region. It shows how groups within politically and scientifically powerful countries appropriate the issue of island vulnerability in ways that do not do justice to the lives of island people. It argues that the ways in which islands and their inhabitants are represented in climate science and politics seldom leads to meaningful responses to assist them to adapt to climate change. Throughout, the authors focus on the hitherto largely ignored social impacts of climate change, and demonstrate that adaptation and mitigation policies cannot be effective without understanding the social systems and values of island societies.

This publication is, as Barry Smit, Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Change at University of Guelph points out, “a timely check on established paradigms and their effectiveness (or otherwise) in contributing to practical adaptation to climate change in vulnerable regions.”

Meanwhile Jon Barnett has been researching climate adaptation in small island states, particularly through the lens of migration, for some time.  His most provocative and recent work released in 2009 was the World Bank-commissioned study “Accommodating Migration to Promote Adaptation to Climate Change.”  The paper examines the ways in which climate change may increase future migration, and the risks associated with such migration. It also examines how migration may enhance the capacity of communities to adapt to climate change.

You can see a distillation of his views on climate change in the Pacific in this short video interview with the Woodrow Wilson Center:

No one is currently emigrating from Pacific small island states principally due to climate change, according to Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne. Barnett situates climate change’s potential future impacts within the broader social, political, and economic challenges for residents of small island states, reminding us that there is great physical and political diversity among these islands.

Stressing the mix of pushes and pulls that motivate people to move, Barnett suggests we examine existing patterns of migration to better understand how they will develop in the future. He emphasizes that climate change is most likely to push islanders to move due to declining food production and drinking water availability, rather than sea-level rise—despite the iconic image of lapping waves submerging low-lying countries. These sober reminders on the complexity of climate-migration links are worth keeping in mind when evaluating the plethora of new reports on the topic.

I came across this excellent blog post by Jared Banks, a US Foreign Service Officer and a member of the International Migration Office in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. He is part of the GMF Transatlantic Study Team investigating the impact of climate change on migration patterns around the world. Recently, he has traveled to Senegal to study first-hand the impacts that the environment has on the vulnerable population.

You can check out his brief blog post here. A final report by GMF, providing a review of findings and recommendations to policymakers and stakeholders will be published in June, 2010.