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Climate change and forced migration:
Observations, projections and implications
Human Development Report 2007/2008
Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world
Human Development Report Office Occasional Paper 2007/17
Oli Brown
Contact:
Human Development Report Office
SARPN acknowledges United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as a source of this document: http://hdr.undp.org
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Summary
In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that the greatest single impact of climate change might be on human migration—with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and agricultural disruption. Since then various analysts have tried to put numbers of future flows of climate migrants (sometimes problematically called ‘climate refugees’)— the most widely repeated prediction being 200 million forced climate migrants by 2050.
But repetition does not make the figure any more accurate. While the scientific argument for climate change is increasingly confident, the impacts of climate change on human population distribution is still unclear and unpredictable. With so many other social, economic and environmental factors at work establishing a linear, causative relationship between climate change and forced migration so far has been difficult.
This is likely to change in future. The available science, summarised in the latest assessment report of the IPCC, translates into a simple fact; on current predictions the ‘carrying capacity’ of large parts of the world will be compromised by climate change.
The meteorological impact of climate change can be divided into two distinct drivers of migration; climate processes such as sea-level rise, salinisation of agricultural land, desertification and growing water scarcity, and climate events such as flooding, storms and glacial lake outburst floods. But non-climate
drivers, such as government policy, population growth and community-level resilience to natural disaster, are also important. All contribute to more vulnerable people living on marginal land exposed to climate change.
The problem is one of time and scale. But the image of a coastal farmer getting inundated by rising sea levels and being forced to pack up and move to a rich country simply is not typical. On the contrary, as is already the case with traditional refugees, it is likely that the burden of providing for climate migrants will be born by the poorest countries—those least responsible for its origins.
Temporary migration as an adaptive response to climate stress is already apparent in many areas. But the picture is nuanced; the ability to migrate is normally a function both of mobility and resources (both financial and social). In other words, the people most vulnerable to climate change are not necessarily the ones most likely to migrate.
Predicting future flows of forced climate migrants is complex; stymied by a lack of baseline data, distorted by population growth and urbanisation and reliant on the evolution of climate change as well as future emissions. Nonetheless this paper sets out three broad scenarios, based on differing emissions forecasts, for what we might expect. These range from the best case scenario where serious emissions reduction takes place, a ‘Marshall Plan’ for adaptation is put in place to the
‘business as usual’ scenario where the large scale migration foreseen by some analysts come true, or are exceeded.
Forced migration hinders development in at least four ways; by increasing pressure on urban infrastructure and services, undermining economic growth, increasing the risk of conflict and leading to worse health, educational and social indicators among migrants themselves.
There has been a collective, and rather successful, attempt to ignore the scale of the problem. Forced climate migrants fall through the cracks of international refugee and immigration policy—and there is considerable resistance to the idea of expanding the definition of political refugees to incorporate climate ‘refugees’. Meanwhile, large scale migration is not taken into account in national adaptation strategies which tend to see migration as a ‘failure of adaptation’. So far there is no ‘home’ for forced climate migrants in the international community, both literally and figuratively.
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