Migration and Slow-onset Events
Desertification and sea-level rise
Environment & Migration
Migration, droughts and
desertification
A relationship difficult to grasp
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Mix of different migration drivers
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Droughts tend to aggravate other problems
Droughts as political events?
Effects on migration difficult to forecast
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Very slow-onset
Migration can decrease at the peak of the drought
Environmental drivers are mixed with other socio-economic
drivers
Two trends in the literature
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Push factors
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Aims to assess the weight of environmental drivers on
migration
Tend to be neo-Malthusian and overly deterministic
Environmental changes do not affect all people the same way,
and people does not respond the same way either.
Multi-level contextual drivers
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Considers the complex interplay between different factors at
the micro-level
Resort to traditional migration models, such as the New
Economics of Migration
Migration as a risk-reduction strategy
The importance of socio-economic factors
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Droughts are often the result of socio-economic
conditions
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Distributional issues
Seasonal migration determined by the seasons and the
labour market
Temporary migration towards urban centres
Households that do not receive remittances are also
those who are the most vulnerable to environmental
degradation
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And these vulnerable households are also those that are the
least able to migrate.
Mobility as a coping strategy
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Mobility is a coping strategy for people living in fragile
environments
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Reduction of dependance to environmental resources
Diversification of income
Migration as an adaptation failure or an adaptation
strategy?
Migration related to slow-onset events tend to be little
acknowledged, and hence litte understood and addressed.
Migration to fight desertification:
The case of Inner Mongolia
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Desertification
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China losing 4,000 square kilometers per year
Dust and sand storms affecting Beijing, Japan and North Korea
Air pollution
Reforestation programmes not very successful
Overgrazing on grasslands
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Chinese authorities accuse Mongolian pastoralists of being
responsible for desertification problems.
Migration patterns
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Important in-migration flows of Han Chinese
Mongol pastoralists moving to towns and cities
‘Environmental Migration’ programme
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Resettlement of pastoralists in villages
Double objective: environmental relief and poverty
alleviation
Political objective as well?
Small compensations offered to migrants
Grasslands closed for 5-10 years
Programme aimed at relocating 650,000 pastoralists in the
period 2001-2007
Sea-level rise
Islands as laboratories
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Exotic islands have often been assimilated to intact, nonperverted spaces
Isolated from time and space
Fit to reproduce laboratory conditions
Providing simple models for the study of more complex
societies
(that is, Western societies)
1928
1874
Islands as places of vulnerability
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Used to be vulnerable to capitalism because of their lack
of resources and weak economic potential.
Now vulnerable to climate change because of their small
size and low elevation.
Also assimilated to places where men are vulnerable.
1719
But what does vulnerability mean?
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Island populations are known for being remarkably
resilient (Barnett 2001, Barnett & Connell 2010)
Vulnerability tends to be a Western discourse, unable to
account for empirical realities (Bankoff 2001)
No agreement on what vulnerability means in
international negotiations
Article 4.8 of UNFCCC
acknowledges a particular
vulnerability for:
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Small-island countries
Countries with low-lying coastal areas
Countries with arid and semi-arid
areas, or forested areas
Countries with areas prone to natural
disasters
Countries with areas liable to drought
and desertification
Countries with areas of high urban
atmospheric pollution
Countries with areas with fragile
ecosystems
Countries whose economies are
highly dependent on fossile fuels
Land-locked and transit countries
Small island states as laboratories of
climate change
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Islands are viewed as the incarnation of the impacts of
climate change
Islanders as the first witnesses (and the first victims) of
climate change
This representation has increasingly been used by SIDS
governments make their voices heard in the negotiations
Islands seem to matter only because they disappear
17 October 2009
In Copenhagen, they had forgotten to put the small islands on the giant globe that was
in the middle of the conference hall.
Canaries in the coalmine
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Canaries were used in coalmines to alert miners about
the presence of toxic gases.
Likewise, ‘refugees’ from small islands are supposed to
alert us about the dangers of climate change.
Deterministic perspective: migration presented as
unavoidable.
Some well-intentioned reactions in Australia
Though well-intentioned, this rhetoric is deeply selfcentred:
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« Look at them to see what’s going to happen to us »
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In the coalmine, canaries were never saved
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‘Climate refugees’ are the living proof that climate
change is happening
Empirical realities
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Migrants from island countries move for a variety of
reasons (Mortreux and Barnett 2008)
And they certainly do not consider themselves as
disempowered victims (Gemenne 2011)
A deterministic perspective fails to capture the complex
realities of migration process
Political responses and their misperception
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In Maldives, the Safe Island policy
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Migration agreements between Tuvalu and New Zealand
Safe Island Policy
Hulhumale
Migration agreements between
New Zealand and Tuvalu
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Pacific Access Category
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For 650 residents of Fiji, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tonga
Tuvalu has an annual quota of 75
Seasonal labour migration
Family reunification
There are currently about 3,000 Tuvaluans living in New
Zealand
Pitfalls of the canaries rhetoric
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Relativist trap (Connell 2003) – can become consubstantial
of islanders’ identity
Might disempower migrants and islanders
Lessening their adaptive capacity
Neglects the possibilities of local adaptation
Current adaptation strategies might get discredited if the
country appears doomed