Climate change and migration

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, my grandfather was the Chairman of CARE, so their new report on the relationship between climate change and migration interests me on both a personal and professional level.

Check out the key findings below, cut and pasted from the Executive Summary:

• Climate change is already contributing to displacement
and migration. Although economic and political factors are
the dominant drivers of displacement and migration today,
climate change is already having a detectable effect.

• The breakdown of ecosystem-dependent livelihoods is likely to
remain the premier driver of long-term migration during the
next two to three decades. Climate change will exacerbate this
situation unless vulnerable populations, especially the poorest,
are assisted in building climate-resilient livelihoods.

• Disasters continue to be a major driver of shorter-term
displacement and migration. As climate change increases the
frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as cyclones,
floods, and droughts, the number of temporarily displaced
people will rise. This will be especially true in countries that
fail to invest now in disaster risk reduction and where the
official response to disasters is limited.

• Seasonal migration already plays an important part in many
families’ struggle to deal with environmental change. This
is likely to become even more common, as is the practice of
migrating from place to place in search of ecosystems that
can still support rural livelihoods.

• Glacier melt will affect major agricultural systems in Asia. As
the storage capacity of glaciers declines, short-term flood
risks increase. This will be followed by decreasing water
flows in the medium- and long-term. Both consequences of
glacier melt would threaten food production in some of the
world’s most densely populated regions.

• Sea level rise will worsen saline intrusions, inundation, storm
surges, erosion, and other coastal hazards. The threat is
particularly grave vis-à-vis island communities. There is strong
evidence that the impacts of climate change will devastate
subsistence and commercial agriculture on many small
islands.

• In the densely populated Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River
deltas, a sea level rise of 1 meter could affect 23.5 million
people and reduce the land currently under intensive
agriculture by at least 1.5 million hectares. A sea level rise of
2 meters would impact an additional 10.8 million people and
render at least 969 thousand more hectares of agricultural
land unproductive.

• Many people won’t be able to flee far enough to adequately
avoid the negative impacts of climate change—unless they
receive support. Migration requires resources (including
financial, social, and political capital) that the most vulnerable
populations frequently don’t have. Case studies indicate that
poorer environmental migrants can find their destinations as
precarious as the places they left behind.