People on the Move
Development programming provides an opportunity to build capacity, address movement and support more resilient outcomes.
The climate is changing at an unprecedented pace. Sudden-onset events such as cyclones, floods, droughts and wildfires are occurring with increased intensity and frequency, threatening assets and increasing the vulnerability of people globally. At the same time, slow-onset events — including sea-level rise, higher temperatures, salinization, land and forest degradation, and desertification — are contributing to pressures on livelihoods, water quality and availability, and food security.
Risks associated with climate variability and change are increasingly recognized as drivers of both internal migration and displacement. These risks, when played out against a backdrop of limited economic opportunities and poor governance — including uneven or inequitable delivery of services, and inadequate political representation (e.g., lack of political will, insufficient government service, corruption) — have the potential to further compromise the resilience of political, economic, social and governance systems. While the causal links between climate change and movement are still being established, weather and climate events (e.g., tropical storms, droughts that stretch through multiple growing seasons, widespread flooding) are a contributing factor in movement. For example, according to the 2019 Global Report on Internal Displacement from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 16.1 million people were displaced by weather-related disasters in 2018, with storms and floods accounting for the highest number of people displaced. In the first half of 2019 alone, Cyclone Fani triggered more than 3.4 million new displacements in India and Bangladesh, while flash floods and landslides in the Philippines led to the displacement of 405,000 people. Thus, climate change likely acts as a risk multiplier, increasing the frequency, intensity and severity of these events, thereby affecting human behavior and movement.
The spatial and temporal variability of predicted changes in climate, coupled with similar challenges forecasting human mobility patterns creates a set of inherently complex dynamics. The motivations that compel people to move and the processes involved are highly variable, contextually diverse and situationally specific to the location and time of occurrence. Further, these motivations are part of a complex ecosystem closely intertwined with micro- (individual/household) and macro-level (community/subnational) drivers. Climate variability and change can likely amplify these drivers by influencing the probability, scale and circumstances of the events that drive people to move. It is therefore important for governments and the development community to be prepared to respond in a way that minimizes social and economic disruptions in both receiving communities and the communities of origin — particularly in locations most at risk from climate variability and change.
This study from USAID contributes to the growing field exploring adaptation responses to climate-related human movement by 1) examining the role of climate variability and change and climate-induced hazards as risk multipliers in the context of human movement and 2) providing practical recommendations for adaptation strategies to support people to remain in their home communities, prepare for and respond to shocks and improve their own and their communities’ adaptive capacities when and where movement does occur. Owing to a lack of literature, it does not delve deeply into specific strategies that receiving communities can use to mitigate the negative impacts of absorbing new populations, and only lightly touches on options for improving the situation of people during movement.
Lessons Learned
Building on both the literature review and the four case studies, the following observations are made:
- Climate variability and change can act as risk multipliers affecting individuals and communities. Local governments in both the sending and receiving communities will bear the brunt of the responsibility for planning and managing internal migration (and, to a degree, displacement). Therefore, migration and displacement policies should be incorporated into both urban and rural development policies to improve the resilience of systems and plan for increased population flows, both temporary and permanent.
- Regional coordination to improve the collection of data specific to migration is essential, as is national-level involvement to provide financial resources and technical expertise, or to resolve disputes between local authorities, is also necessary.
- As climate-related movement takes many different forms, it will continue to require context-specific policy responses rather than a one-size-fits all approach. Political context, the number of people likely to be affected (and their social, economic and geographic characteristics), the nature of the climate or natural hazard, human capacity and available resources are all key factors that will shape policy responses.
- While there is a growing consensus that internal migration and displacement will increase due to climate variability and change, gaps remain in accurately estimating the number of people who are likely to move and the extent to which measures to promote climate resilience will reduce this number. There is also consensus that most displacement and migration is and will continue to be internal with movement primarily from rural to urban settings. It is also widely accepted that people who move in response to climatic and environmental stressors/impacts will tend to follow existing patterns of internal movement for economic reasons.
- Sudden-onset natural disasters are most likely to trigger temporary displacement, while longer-term climate change, given its slower onset but more permanent change, is more likely to influence internal migration.
Recommendations and Adaptation Actions to Address Movement
Development programming represents a critical opportunity to build capacity and provide key resources to address movement in adaptation planning and implementation, and support more resilient outcomes. Adaptation actions that affect movement might seek to minimize the impact of weather events and a changing climate on populations that might otherwise result in displacement or internal migration. Hazard-specific adaptation actions can both limit a population’s exposure and sensitivity to climate variability and change and weather-related events, and support improved adaptive capacity.
Droughts and extreme temperatures
Adaptation actions aimed at addressing drought typically focus more on increasing adaptive capacity and reducing sensitivity — particularly within populations that rely on rain-fed agriculture and grazing for livestock — and less on reducing exposure, which can be difficult or impractical. Recommended adaptation actions specific to droughts and extreme temperatures include:
- Improvement of livestock management.
- Improvement of agricultural techniques.
- Improvement of water management.
- Promotion of alternate or diversify livelihoods.
- Improvement of information and planning.
Floods and landslides
Adaptation actions for flooding focus heavily on reducing exposure (and, to a lesser extent, sensitivity) by decreasing the likelihood of a flood or landslide occurring due to heavy precipitation event, and less on increasing a community’s adaptive capacity. Recommended adaptation actions for flooding and landslides include:
- Reduction of deforestation.
- Encouragement of reforestation.
- Construction of hard infrastructure and physical defenses.
- Restoration of natural defenses and construct green infrastructure.
Tropical storms
Adaptation actions for tropical storms frequently focus on reducing exposure and sensitivity, and seek to minimize the impacts of storms on homes and livelihoods, thus reducing displacement or the length of time a community is displaced. Recommended adaptation actions for tropical storms include
- Improvement of housing construction and location.
- Increase of hard and green infrastructure defenses against storm surge.
Sea-level rise
Adaptation actions to address sea level rise typically focus on short-term protection strategies, and longterm preparation and planning strategies. Recommended adaptation actions to address sea level rise include:
- Construction of physical barriers, both hard and green infrastructure.
- Relocation or building of new infrastructure at higher elevations.
Actions to reduce overall vulnerability
While the adaptation actions listed above are tied to specific hazards, in reality, many adaptation actions have multiple benefits. The following adaptation actions can reduce overall household- and community-level vulnerability irrespective of the specific hazard:
- Increase of access to or assistance to communities to access crop and livestock insurance to protect against loss or failure caused by drought, flooding and tropical storms
- Strengthening of remittance networks and infrastructure to protect against loss of livelihood caused by extreme weather events.
- Improve weather observation networks and increase public access to weather and climate information.
- Support for climate-proofing of infrastructure, including hardening and protecting bridges and roadways, and hardening and/or relocating critical infrastructure to protect against flooding, more intense tropical storms, and sea-level rise.
- Strengthening of policies and regulations including land use and development regulations, land reform and titling, environmental and natural resource management plans, emergency response plans, water allocation plans, and water abstraction regulations.
In addition to the above-highlighted hazard-related adaptation actions, the following country-level and targeted programmatic activities can be considered:
- Support to government to include internal migration and displacement planning in climate adaptation, risk-reduction and national development policies starting with developing and updating national adaptation plans.
- Assistance to government introduction of migration procedure templates for municipal planning processes or work directly with municipalities on local development plans.
- Participation in donor-led international and host country initiatives, such as conducting large-scale, longitudinal studies tracking climate impacts and related human movement, to assess links between climate variability and change and internal migration and to justify effective responses.
- Coordination with donor organizations to assist host countries to access climate funding (e.g., Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility and other international entities) aimed at strengthening internal migration governance, including use of the capacity development mechanism included in the Global Compact on Migration, which addresses both internal and external migration.
- Promotion of data- and research-sharing between host governments and other donors to better support migration and displacement planning and responses. Investment in early- warning systems that track slow-onset and extreme climate events and migration trends to advance from reactive response to proactive resilience building actions.
- Coordination with international governance bodies relevant to in-country migration and displacement programming. Improvement of coordination and programming with explicit or implicit links to movement, including resilience activities, to better understand the correlation between climactic drivers and movement.
- Alignment of practice with policy to build resilience. In Kenya, for example, although progress is being made toward integrating climate and mobility into relevant policy, older policies still exist that work at cross purposes, such as 1) state-driven development that privatizes or otherwise limits access to lands used by pastoralists, and 2) conservation-related land enclosures that result in displacement or remove access to resources with inadequate safeguards or compensation for those whose livelihoods are adversely impacted.
- Improvement in guidance to help governments consider internal migration and remittance flows in climate resilience efforts as they may mitigate the need for future large-scale relocation. However, there are some cases (small island developing states, in particular) where the nature of the hazard is so significant that future relocation seems an unavoidable conclusion. Thus, even if the risk is not imminent, local authorities in areas with documented evidence of climate vulnerability might want to begin contingency planning to ensure any future relocation is as well managed and organized as possible.
- Provision of adequate and coordinated support to ensure community engagement and careful planning that mitigates against policies or actions that might contribute to existing disparities among the internal migrants or people in receiving communities. For planned relocations, resource coordination between state and non-state actors will be critical to ensure that those who have not migrated earlier receive the assistance needed to relocate. Specifically, research on indigenous communities in Alaska demonstrates the importance of community engagement in the decision to relocate. At the same time, a draft relocation guideline in Fiji is an example of a national policy that incorporates lessons learned from development-induced displacement into a set of robust guidelines for relocation efforts in response to climate change.
- Improvement in data and modeling to help government policymakers better understand 1) what climate stressors lead to increases in human movement and the related temporal and spatial effects, 2) how circular migration fits into adaptation, risk-reduction and development planning and 3) the importance of engaging sending and receiving communities when developing and implementing such policies.
To learn more, view the full report.