Climate Change Migration Research Articles

Water marginality in rural and peri-urban communities

Water supply in an increasing number of rural and peri-urban communities can be described as marginal i.e. subject to failure, becoming unaffordable or increasingly difficult to access. A range of common factors contribute to water marginalisation or access bias. Firstly, communities may be poorly served by formal water infrastructure by being on the margins of urban settlements. Secondly, where water infrastructure exists, this may be prone to failure as local municipalities and water utilities with limited capacity and resources struggle to maintain a widely dispersed system. Thirdly, when local water systems fail, they are often not repaired quickly, if repaired at all. This results in people, often with very limited resources having to obtain water from far distances or having to pay someone to transport water to them in order to meet their basic water needs. Thus, where water supplies are unreliable, unaffordable and difficult to access, geography, urban settlement patterns, the choice of water distribution systems, and the management capacity result in water marginality.This paper investigates water marginality in communities in rural and peri-urban areas in South Africa. It utilises surveys and interviews of communities, the local authority, water and urban planning officials, to understand the nature of this marginality, and investigates the key contributory factors. This forms the basis for recommendations on how access and marginalisation challenges can be addressed. The paper provides valuable insights on how, and why, water marginality occurs, and proposes strategies for sustainable solutions. As climate change and rural-urban migration accentuate water marginality, the study offers important and timely insights in an area that urgently requires further research.

EU Banking in the COVID-19 Crisis: Time for a 'New Deal'

The current COVID-19 sanitary and economic crisis requires a “New Deal” between EU governments and EU banks: EU banks agree to partner with governments in enabling the effective transmission of the government’s vital financial support to the real economy in exchange for a transformation of the EU banking sector. This deal consists of a quid pro quo: governments condition the transmission via the banking sector of considerable monies to the real economy on a rationalization of the EU banking sector, which thus would become part of the post-COVID-19 “new normal.”To be successful, this unparalleled support of the EU economy will come with governmental guarantees and fees for banking services. Banks partnering in the salvage operation would be required to review and render their business models “fit for purpose.” A three-layered banking ecosystem in the EU should thus emerge one serving large corporates across the EU and also abroad, a second serving particular geographies and industries, and a third one more focused on retail clients and communities. Given the EU's openness and size, the region should host several banks of global standing and reach. The COVID-19 crisis is also an opportune time to enhance EU capital markets as a complement to the banking sector, especially with London's departure as a European financial center. The necessity of this project has been stated by many; COVID-19 has made it imperative to act. If this “New EU Banking Deal” deal does not materialize, the EU saga will include one more lost opportunity. More importantly, the consequences for both the banking sector and the entire EU financial and economic systems risk being dire. EU and banking authorities will have added to the costs of the economic and health catastrophes unfolding in front of us. Effective EU governance has never been more necessary in the face of major global issues such as COVID-19, climate change, and North-South migration. Now is the time for EU nations and their leaders in the public and private sectors to agree to a more robust financial union serving the EU population and its corporations. In doing so, the EU leadership will have met the growing concerns of an impatient EU public querying the purpose and value of the EU project.

Climate Change and Ecological Migration: A Study of Villages in the Province of Khuzestan, Iran

Immigration is in fact the response and decision of an individual or a family to change the situation and is often one of the biggest experiences and decisions in everyone’s life. However, the key point is the reasons for immigration. Although the most extensive immigration flows among urban and rural settlements have so far been economic migrations, climate change has recently become a decisive factor for migration in many parts of the world with ecological migration becoming the dominant model in these demographic movements. Khuzestan province - with a strategic position in southwest of Iran and 30% share of rural population- is one of the provinces that has been affected by widespread climate change over the past two decades, experiencing massive population movements, especially in the rural areas. This massive population flow in the rural parts of the province has become a regional challenge. The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the effects of climate change on demographic movements in the rural settlements of Khuzestan province. The study is descriptive-analytic and the information is extracted from the database of the Statistics Center of Iran. Statistical analysis has shown that the decline in the rates of rural population growth from -02 in 1986 to -4.6 in 2017 and the evacuation of more than 2398 villages over 1986-2017 have been directly and indirectly related to the diverse effects of climate change.

Migration as one of several adaptation strategies for environmental limitations in Tunisia: evidence from El Faouar

Water scarcity and management of this problem are increasingly acknowledged in development policies as well as in adaptation and migration discourse. In South Mediterranean countries, insufficient water supplies in oases are the biggest limitation on yields of sufficient quantity and quality and increase in arable land, in short, the development of agriculture. Insufficient income from agriculture, when it is the main source of revenue, can push people to migrate. However, migration does not have to be the measure of last resort. Proper adaption to this limitation, including proactive migration, can reduce forced movements from this region in the future. The main aim of this paper is to identify and analyse household strategies, including migration, to cope with and adapt to the impact of environmental changes and limitations on agricultural development in the South Mediterranean. This paper is based on field research carried out in the El Faouar oasis area in Tunisia using a mixed-method approach. The results show that the inhabitants of El Faouar must cope with unforeseen crop destruction limiting their daily expenses by selling livestock or, in years of drought, migrating to look for additional sources of income. The results also show that local households try to increase their resistance to climate change, environmental limitations, and permanent migration by developing their agricultural capacity, provided they have additional resources from such endeavours as work outside El Faouar or remittances. Moreover, migration has become part of a wider process of socio-economic transformation in which people leave in order to cope with or adapt to environmental changes.

The African Union's Environmental Year-in-Review. The Progressive Development of Environmental Law

The African Union’s environmental year 2019 makes it possible to draws attention of scholars and decision-makers on the most recent developments in environmental law and policy in the framework of the continental organisation. Throughout 2019, the African Union main organs, the Assembly of African Union and the Executive Council, as well as their technical supports, the Specialized Technical Committees and other, have dealt with a variety of issues related to environment, climate, and further sustainable development. At the outset, it is worth noting that voluntarism appears to be a very characteristic of the African Union’s commitment, such an approach is also sustained by the obvious determination of the organisation to engage the strict pathway to the energy transition. This paper proposes to set forth the tremendous developments related to trade and environment, climate change, sustainable development, forced displacement and internal migration, natural disasters, etc. Effective steps are made in order to promote programmes, initiatives, and strategical plans aiming at correlating environment, energy and natural resources law and policy consolidation throughout the continent.

Out of the Frying Pan: Climate Change and Internal Migration in Brazil

When global warming affects productivity in climate-sensitive sectors, migration represents a potential adaptation mechanism. We exploit exogenous variation in temperatures and precipitation across Brazil and examine the response in state-to-state migration flows between 1981 and 2010. Accounting for time-varying migration costs using a novel road dataset constructed by digitizing historical maps, and addressing the endogeneity of the roads network, we find strong evidence that states with warming temperatures exhibit higher levels of emigration, particularly in the agricultural sector. Our results suggest that holding travel cost constant states that experience a 10 percent increase in Celsius temperatures will see an 8.8 percent increase in emigration to other Brazilian states. Interestingly, while rising temperatures clearly play a role in pushing migrants out, we do not generally find that migrants pay attention to the temperatures of their destination. Awareness of the climate at destination is however much higher if migrants have been exposed to droughts at origin. These ambiguous findings raise questions about whether migrants appreciate the role of climate in their relocation decisions or simply react to the consequences of climate change, e.g. in the form of lower agricultural productivity.

A magyar biztonságpercepció elemzése

E tanulmány arra keresi a választ, hogy hogyan percepcionálja a magyar társadalom a biztonság- és védelempolitikával, illetve a haderővel kapcsolatos kulcskérdéseket napjainkban, emellett pedig arra is kísérletet tesz, hogy kontextusba helyezze a társadalmi biztonságpercepció alakulását azoknak a szakembereknek a percepciójával, akik aktívan részt vesznek a magyar biztonság- és védelempolitika formálásában a Honvédelmi Minisztériumban. Az empirikus adatok alapján úgy tűnik, hogy a magyar társadalom a klímaváltozást és az irreguláris migrációt egyformán fenyegetőnek tartja az ország biztonsága szempontjából, míg a védelempolitikai szakemberek elsősorban az irreguláris migrációt, a nemzetközi terrorizmust és a hibrid fenyegetéseket látják a leginkább problémásnak. Mind a magyar társadalom, mind pedig a szakértői szint elkötelezett ugyanakkor az ország jelenlegi szövetségi rendszere iránt, és mindkét szint a Visegrádi Csoportot, az Egyesült Államokat és Németországot látja a legfontosabb katonai partnernek. Míg a társadalom többsége jelentős mértékben támogatná az európai védelmi integráció előmozdítását – akár kormányzati jogkörök átadása esetén is – addig a szakértők jóval szkeptikusabban látják az európai védelmi kezdeményezéseket. A társadalom többsége a jelenlegi szinten tartaná, vagy még tovább növelné az ország védelmi kiadásait, míg a magyar védelempolitikai közösség jelentős mértékben támogatja az elmúlt években végbement kiadásnövelést.

The Changing Faces of the UN Security Council

The World Organisation of the United Nations was not conceived of at its origins as a world government. Nor could the substantive provisions of the Charter claim to constitute a comprehensive constitutional document for the entire globe. Many crucial issues of world order relevance were left open at the founding conference of San Francisco, the expectation being that any remaining structural problems would later be resolved by peaceful means. Nonetheless, it was hoped by many observers that the Security Council would be able to establish itself as an instance of last resort to address any emerging emergency situations. While the Security Council was legally well-endowed with decision-making powers under Chapter VII of the Charter, it initially encountered great difficulties in making use of those powers, given in particular the veto right of the five permanent members. After 1990, the differences of opinion among the permanent members softened considerably for a couple of years so that the Security Council could discharge at least some of the responsibilities entrusted to it. Additionally, the Security Council has gradually succeeded in enlarging its purview of action through recourse to its power of issuing recommendations under Chapter VI to individual States. Such country-specific recommendations have permitted the Security Council to engage itself in peace-building through promoting constitutional and societal reforms in many States, in particular in Africa. This kind of interference in domestic matters relies now on a consolidated basis of consistent practice. The evolutionary interpretation of the provisions of the Charter may at the same time suggest that the key concept of ‘threat to the peace’ in Article 39 of the Charter should also be understood in a way that enables the international community to address global predicaments like climate change and international migration.

Climate Change and Forced Migration

The population of environmentally displaced people has increased recently, thus this article aims to address the challenges climate change may impose on Nation-States concerning human rights in relation to forced migration. The relationship between climate change and forced migration will be studied in order to present the problems arising from the allocation of international responsibility among States and the international protection (or the lack thereof) of “Climate Refugees” and stateless persons caused by the disappearance of Nation- States under climate change; solutions will be proposed under the existing International Human Rights Law.

Climate and Nomadic Migration in a Nonlinear World: Evidence of the Historical China

This paper deals with climate change and nomadic migration relationships at a long term and wide geographical scale using a statistical approach in the vein of Bai and Kung (2011). More precisely, it presents a reassessment of these relationships in a nonlinear world using threshold regressions, time varying-copula and nonlinear causality tests. The large amount of historical records in China enables us to re-interpret the link between climate and historical social dynamics (Hsiang et al., 2013) through different regimes of temperatures and precipitations.

Climate change and migration: Is agriculture the main channel?

Migration and climate change are two of the most important challenges the world currently faces. They are connected as climate change may stimulate or hinder migration. One of the sectors strongly affected by climate change is agriculture, which is the source of income for most of the world's poor. Climate change may affect agricultural productivity and hence migration because of its impact on average temperatures and rainfall and because it increases the frequency and intensity of weather shocks. In this paper we use data on 108 countries from 1960 to 2010 to analyze the relationship between weather variations, changes in agricultural productivity and international migration. We find that negative shocks to agricultural productivity caused by climate fluctuations significantly increase emigration from developing countries, an especially strong impact in poor countries but less so in middle income countries. These results are robust to the definitions of the poor country sample, and to several checks and alternative explanations suggested by the literature. Importantly, our results point to a causal interpretation of the agricultural channel to explain the climate change-migration nexus.

“Climate Refugees”—A Useful Concept?

“Climate Refugees”—A Useful Concept?

Climate Change Migration and Displacement: Learning from Past Relocations in the Pacific

It has been projected that the single greatest impact of environmental changes will be on human migration and displacement. Migration has been extensively discussed and documented as an adaptation strategy in response to environmental changes, and more recently, to climate change. However, forced relocation will lead to the displacement of people, and although much has been written about it, very little has been documented from the Pacific Islands perspective, especially by communities that were forced to relocate as a result of colonialism and those that have been forced to migrate today as a result of climate change impacts. Using the Gilbertese resettlement from the Phoenix Islands to the Solomon Islands, in particular, Wagina Island in the 1960s as a case study of forced relocation and displacement of Pacific Islands people during the colonial period, this paper aims to underline some of the important lessons that can be learned from this historical case to inform the present and future challenges of climate change migration and displacement. Without dismissing migration as a coping strategy, the paper argues that the forced relocation of people from their home islands as a result of climate change will lead to displacement. It accentuates that in the case of Pacific Islands, forced relocation will lead to displacement if they are forced to leave their land because of their deep relationship and attachment to it. The paper also emphasizes the need to acknowledge and honor Pacific Islands’ voices and perceptions in discourses on climate change migration and displacement at national, regional and international forums.

Not a Security Issue: How Policy Experts De-Politicize the Climate Change–Migration Nexus

Policy experts play an important role in coping with the climate change–human migration nexus. They offer expert solutions to decision makers, and thus, they contribute to de-politicizing the issue. The aim of this paper is to find out how different policy experts envision the climate change–human migration nexus. The Netherlands has been nominated as the seat of a Global Center of Excellence for climate Adaptation and aims to become a Global Center of Excellence in the water safety and security domain. Policy experts were selected based on a structured nominee process. We conducted semistructured interviews with policy experts and analyzed policy expert documentation. Interview transcripts and documents were examined via a coding frame. Unlike policymakers who link climate change and conflict, policy experts stress the economic and political factors of migration in which climate change issues happen. The major difference between the view of policymakers and policy experts on the link between climate change and human migration emerges from the frame of the climate refugee. In the context of the climate change–human migration nexus, policy experts act as a countervailing power that prevents the political exploitation of the nexus into a security issue.

Climate-Induced Migration: Impacts on Social Structures and Justice in Bangladesh

In the wider context of several primary climate change impacts affecting low-lying coastal areas of Bangladesh, this article examines how the phenomenon of ‘climate change migration’ creates national and local secondary complications for internal population displacement as well as increasingly visible tertiary impacts. These are manifested in rapid urbanisation and precarious socio-economic and environmental changes in urban contexts. Highlighting the growing interconnection of climate change, migration and urbanisation in Bangladesh, the article calls for effective local policy changes to address the urgent need to safeguard sustainable livelihoods and security of fundamental rights for climate change migrants.

The evolution of the policy environment for climate change migration in Bangladesh: Competing narratives, coalitions and power

AbstractIn spite of an enormous increase in attention to climate migration in Bangladesh, institutional weaknesses have meant that unplanned migration has triggered social issues. This situation requires investigation of the main challenges and opportunities in institutional capacity and policy development for climate change induced migration. Drawing on different narratives, networks and power status of stakeholders, this study identifies two competing coalitions: ‘in‐situ’ coalition, which shares the belief that migration is a failure of adaptation, and ‘ex‐situ’ coalition adhering to the emerging slogan of “migration as adaptive strategy.” The differentiated powers of two coalitions to some extent leave the agenda of climate migration in the policy domain as a subject of informal institutional capacity rather than a formal regulatory framework. Consequently, the evolution of the policy environment for climate migration depends on how effectively a greater policy space is determined by narratives, coalitions and power. Through a political economy lens, this article seeks to clarify the potential approaches to extending the policy space regarding climate migration in Bangladesh, first by improving ideological pluralism in international climate change finance, and, second, enhancing the bottom‐up process for resource mobilization. In short, the evolution of the policy environment for climate change largely depends on the political power of the ‘ex‐situ’ coalition.

The meaning of farming beyond being a livelihood strategy: the complex linkages between climate change, agriculture and international migration in Zacatecas, Mexico

ABSTRACTIn this paper I argue that the cultural meaning of subsistence farming is at least equally important as its function as a livelihood strategy in rural Mexico for at least two reasons. First, subsistence farming is more or less important during different stages of people’s lives. Many young people, particularly men, intend to migrate to the USA for work and have little interest in farming, while older people keep up the tradition of farming the land they inherited from their ancestors. Second, in most cases only households who rely on external sources of income for their basic needs – including remittances – can afford keeping the tradition of subsistence farming and take the risk of crop failures. Poorer households, in contrast, tend to stop farming when revenues cannot be guaranteed, and they might also be unable to afford international migration. Drawing on qualitative empirical data collected in two rural communities in the Mexican state Zacatecas in 2008 and in 2018 these findings contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between more frequent and more severe droughts, related changes to the yield output of subsistence farming for rural dwellers, and outmigration to the USA in times of climate change.

Human mobility intentions in response to heat in urban South East Asia

Climate change and associated weather extremes and natural hazards have large impacts on the urban population of the Global South where population growth will rapidly increase the already large number of people who will be affected. Using Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), we investigate how hot temperatures, manifested as heat stress, is affecting the intentions of moving among the urban population in three Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines). We conducted an online survey with 2219 respondents. Almost all respondents (98%) had experienced heat stress, albeit at different levels. When asked whether respondents would be likely to move away from their current locations because of heat, nearly a quarter (23%) reported that they were very likely to do so, and 50% that they probably would. Stronger moving intentions because of heat were associated with women and older people. Concerns about increases from damage from heat (threat appraisal) were more strongly associated with moving intentions than an understanding of the costs and benefits (coping appraisal). Among the threat appraisal, heat stress levels and risk perception were the strongest predictors of moving intentions because of heat. The results contrast with the findings of migration studies in response to sudden onset hazards and underpin the differences in adaptation behaviour in response to different climate change impacts. Moving away to cooler places as an adaptation strategy to heat may be challenging to foresee in terms of timing, capabilities, destination and potential costs because it may not happen soon. We strongly recommend further research on climate change migration of the urban population, including within urban and urban-to-urban movements. While many people move back after sudden onset disasters, heat potentially leads to permanent movements given it is likely to be better planned, and as the habitability of some places is increasingly compromised. Overall the effects of slow onset environmental hazards such as pollution and heat on migration warrant more research attention given the rapidity of urban population growth, particularly in the global south.

Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating Robyn Metcalfe MIT Press, 2019. 205 pp.

This week on the Science podcast, food historian and futurist Robyn Metcalfe discusses how climate change and human migration are affecting food logistics, how scientists and engineers are tackling food waste, and the perils of incorporating too much technology into the food supply chain.

The Fable of The Three Little Pigs: Climate Change and Green Cultural Criminology

This paper builds on previous calls for a green cultural criminology that is more attuned to narrative, as well as a narrative criminology that does not limit itself to nonfictional stories of offenders, in two ways. First, it considers how a particular kind of environmental narrative—that of climate change—appears, as well as criticisms thereof. In analysing and assessing existing climate change narratives, this paper contemplates the approach of heritage studies to loss and the (theme of) uncertainty surrounding climate-induced migration and human displacement. Second, this paper allegorises the fable of The Three Little Pigs as a story of climate change migration—an aspect of climate change that is misrepresented (and sometimes missing) in the discourse. This paper concludes with additional arguments for approaching, reading and analysing stories regarding human–human and human–environment relationships.