A confluence of factors appears to be driving debate on the linkage between climate change and migration – but sound empirical evidence certainly is not one of them, writes Alexander Betts, director of GEG’s Global Migration Governance programme.
I have just attended a two-day Refugee Studies Centre-International Migration Institute workshop in Oxford on Environmental Change and Migration: Assessing the Evidence and Developing Norms for Response. While the attempt of the workshop to assess the existing evidence was laudable, I have come away highly sceptical about the direction of the existing research agenda on the climate change-migration linkage.
Interest in ‘environmental migration’ and ‘environmentally-induced displacement’ have surged in response to media hype and extravagant predictions of ‘climate change refugees’ by commentators like Norman Myers. Yet, there is little evidence to support much of what amounts to speculation about the relationship between climate change and human mobility.
The attempt of the workshop convenors to bring together the range of people doing empirical work in this area was therefore extremely useful and constructive. However, what is apparent is the paucity of existing evidence on the relationship between the environment and human mobility, despite the existence of research projects such as the EU-funded EACH-FOR project, which is attempting to examine the relationship.
Although I am not a scientist, I find it difficult to challenge the existing IPCC consensus on the science of climate change. We clearly have a problem. However, it is a far more complex question to ask what this scientific consensus means on a social level. Social science is very bad at making predictions about people’s future behaviour. Furthermore, how people respond to environmental change is contingent on a range of factors including their individual and community resilience. How climate change will impact on human mobility is mediated by so many factors including conflict, livelihood opportunities, and social ecology. With the possible exception of relatively clear-cut cases of ‘sinking islands’, the multi-causal nature of the relationship makes it almost impossible to attribute causality directly to climate change.
Given the difficulties of making predictions about the future, the search for evidence about the environment-migration linkage (and possible lessons for climate change migration) is focusing on other current and past example of how environmental change (resulting from desertification, air pollution, the loss of natural resources, flooding etc.) have impacted about people’s decision to stay put, move within their country, or migrate across borders. This is clearly the most fruitful available source of insight and lessons in relation to social transformation, adaptation, resilience and patterns of mobility. However, even here, multi-causality poses enormous problems. The existing research is struggling to overcome problems of multicolinearity or to come up with falsifiable hypothesis and identify counterfactuals in order to say anything meaningful – let alone generalisable – about the relationship between environmental change and migration. Isolating and showing the significance of the ‘environmental factor’ is almost impossible; it will nearly always be part of a complex and mediated relationship.
As a social science project, there is limited potential for discretely defining a sub-discipline of ‘environment and migration’ or ‘environmentally-induced displacement’. Rather, the environment is one important factor – and a previously neglected factor – amongst other independent variables in explaining human mobility. But exactly how it will interact with other factors is likely to be so contextually contingent as to defy generaliseable claims. It will depend upon the type of environmental change, the culture of a community, economic and livelihood factors, the presence of factors likely to exacerbate or mitigate conflict, resilience of coping mechanisms.
Given the huge limitations of ‘showing’ an empirical linkage, the more interesting and neglected question for research appears to be a political one: why is it that policy-makers and research funding to attempting to identify, create or highlight the environment-migration linkage? Why has environmental migration suddenly been rediscovered? Clearly, a big part of the reason is that there is a genuine concern to address the human consequences of climate change, and the migration and displacement question is part of the broader debate on climate change adaptation.
As the climate change debate has shifted from a focus on mitigation to one on adaptation, so the terms of the debate have changed. A range of stakeholders have been keen to show a relationship between climate change and a range of apocalyptic or threatening scenarios. The linkage to migration serves a range of interests. The media has been at forefront of making the claims. Some academics have sought to make exaggerated claims to enhance careers. Some Northern states have used the link to reinvigorate the securitisation of South-North migration. It is perhaps no coincidence that the European Commission, Germany and Greece have been amongst the most interested states. Intergovernmental organisations engaged in migration and humanitarianism (UNHCR, IOM, OCHA etc.) have been debating how to divide up the environmental migration cake have been squabbling for turf and resources in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Working Group. They have struggled to agree even on basis definition but nevertheless seem concerned to appear actively engaged in an issue that even the UN Secretary-General has proclaimed to be a priority. On the environmental side, the migration linkage also seems a powerful one to highlight interdependence between climate change impacts in the developing world and consequences for the North. A confluence of factors appears to be driving debate on the linkage – but sound empirical evidence certainly is not one of them.
I am not suggesting that there is no relationship between environmental change and human mobility. Clearly, there is and always has been. However, what I am suggesting is that, so far, the existing social science research appears to be doing little to clarify this relationship let alone to shed light on what climate change will mean for patterns of human mobility. If anything, it is contributing to a wider policy discourse that is reinforcing a set of pre-conceived assumptions about the relationship. There is a growing ideational/discursive linkage between migration and the environment. Exactly what the empirical/material linkage is remains unclear.
Social science could perhaps more usefully turn its scrutiny to asking why the ideational linkage has emerged rather than what the material linkage is or is not.
December 7th, 2009 at 11:05 am
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