Routledge Handbook of Environmental Displacement and Migration

Robert McLeman, François Gemenne, Robert McLeman, François Gemenne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317272243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The last twenty years have seen a rapid increase in scholarly activity and publications dedicated to environmental migration and displacement, and the field has now reached a point in terms of profile, complexity, and sheer volume of reporting that a general review and assessment of existing knowledge and future research priorities is warranted. So far, such a product does not exist.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Displacement and Migration provides a state-of-the-science review of research on how environmental variability and change influence current and future global migration patterns and, in some instances, trigger large-scale population displacements. Drawing together contributions from leading researchers in the field, this compendium will become a go-to guide for established and newly interested scholars, for government and policymaking entities, and for students and their instructors. It explains theoretical, conceptual, and empirical developments that have been made in recent years; describes their origins and connections to broader topics including migration research, development studies, and international public policy and law; and highlights emerging areas where new and/or additional research and reflection are warranted.

The structure and the nature of the book allow the reader to quickly find a concise review relevant to conducting research or developing policy on particular topics, and to obtain a broad, reliable survey of what is presently known about the subject.

Part I
Existing knowledge, theories and methods

1
Environmental migration research

Evolution and current state of the science

Robert McLeman and François Gemenne

The timeliness of this volume

We are at a moment in time when concerns about environmental challenges, migration, and international security are becoming increasingly intertwined – in political debates, in policymaking discussions, in media reporting, and in scholarly research. Thirty years ago – perhaps as recently as fifteen years ago – the present volume would have been neither possible nor needed. It would have been impossible because there was very little reliable research of a theoretical or empirical nature to show any systematic connections between environmental changes, human population movements, and the wellbeing and security of individuals, households, and states. This does not mean the connections never existed, but simply that a lot of research had yet to be done. This book would not have been needed because the audience for it would have been tiny. Relatively few researchers and even fewer policymakers paid much attention to environmental migration on any sustained basis until the mid-1990s, and even then, interest in the topic advanced in fits and starts for another decade. Most likely, such a volume would not have been thought of, period.

What has happened in the last decade to create interest in the subject of environmental migration and displacement (EMD) (Box 1.1) and a demand for research? Three things, we would suggest.

The first is that a threshold has been crossed in terms of societal awareness of the extent and scale of human degradation of the environment and of the worrying implications for human wellbeing, especially the risks posed by anthropogenic climate change. It was only thirty years ago that the UN General Assembly tasked the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with creating what would eventually become the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Only twenty-five years ago was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) drafted, and only twenty years ago were the first concrete steps to tackle climate change agreed upon by the international community through the Kyoto Protocol, in 1997. In the decade that followed, there was a veritable explosion in media coverage of climate change, especially in countries that were most responsible for global carbon emissions (Schmidt et al. 2013). The IPCC and US Vice- President-turned-environmental-activist Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Governments and institutions that fifteen years previously had had little knowledge or interest in climate science were being asked through UNFCCC processes and by media and interest groups in their home countries to assess their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, and to explain their policies and programs for mitigating their greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change was no longer just an abstract, scientific concern, but was becoming a very concrete reality for millions. Demand for reliable research grew commensurately. In the meantime, climate science itself became increasingly sophisticated, continuously generating greater understanding of the teleconnections between the changing composition of the atmosphere and the resulting impacts on global and regional temperatures, precipitation patterns, biodiversity, ocean circulation, and so forth. Whilst the science continues to evolve rapidly, it has become increasingly evident what the physical changes are likely to be in coming decades if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow unabated (IPCC 2013).

Box 1.1 What is EMD?

In this chapter, we use the acronym ‘EMD’ as a substitute for the phrase ‘environmental migration and displacement’, which forms part of the title of the present Handbook. In academic literature, many different terms have been used to describe the phenomenon of people moving for reasons related to events, conditions, and changes in the natural environment, some examples including ecomigrants, environmental refugees, and climate displacees. In selecting EMD, we have sought out a term that provides a broad but clearly delineated description of the phenomenon that is easily recognizable and does not carry any specific legal implications. It includes people who choose to migrate with full agency, those who have no choice but to migrate, and the full spectrum of possibilities in between. It reflects an oft-cited, widely accepted definition of what constitutes an environmental migrant put forth by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has considerable experience and expertise in working with such people:

Environmental migrants are persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their homes or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad.

(IOM 2011)

Second, there has been growing awareness that environmental degradation has far-reaching consequences for human wellbeing and, consequently, for human mobility and migration patterns. Beginning in the late 1800s, there has been in western scholarly traditions a general understanding that human population processes and patterns are influenced to some degree by environmental conditions, but for reasons described ahead, social scientists – who do the bulk of migration research – were slow to engage with the subject. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of catastrophic famines and natural disaster events struck countries in Africa and Asia, that significant numbers of scholars began investigating the question of how environment and migration may be connected. Even then, most of the published research was carried out by researchers and NGOs not historically engaged in migration research, resulting in the emergence and popularization of terms like ‘environmental refugees’ that continue to be used by media, policymakers, and the general public, to the frustration of many social scientists. It was only with the emergence of the UNFCCC process and the sustained attention given to climate change impacts in successive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that social scientists, legal scholars and others outside the traditional natural hazards research community began studying EMD systematically. The British government and the European Union (EU) played an important role in fostering a rapid expansion of EMD research in the early 2000s by funding large, multi-year research initiatives to provide policy-oriented research on the topic. Again, details follow.

Third, the end of the Cold War in 1991 meant that security agencies and security scholars began taking an interest in broader influences on international security, including environmental factors. Scholars such as political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon (1991) and ecologist Norman Myers (1993) warned of environmental conflicts and environmental refugees to come in future decades. A story about environmental degradation, conflict, and refugees in West Africa published in the February, 1994, issue of the Atlantic Monthly, bearing the title “The Coming Anarchy”, was required reading in Bill Clinton’s White House (Dabelko and Dabelko 1995). By 2003, the US government was commissioning studies of the security implications of climate change (Schwartz and Randall 2003), and on two subsequent occasions the UN Security Council debated the international security implications of climate change. In 2007, civil conflict in Darfur among pastoral groups and sedentary farmers during a period of persistent drought was described by then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as being the first example of climate change-related conflict (on the basis of UNEP [2007]), although many researchers questioned the reliability of such claims (Brown and McLeman 2009). In the meantime, reporters began actively seeking out the world’s first ‘climate change refugees’, finding examples in locations as disparate as coastal Alaska, the South Pacific, dryland areas around Lake Chad, Chesapeake Bay, and Louisiana. Security researchers today generally agree that climate change and other environmental factors can indeed act as ‘threat multipliers’ in countries and regions where political tensions and instability are already strong, but that the connections between environment, violence, conflict, and migration are nuanced and context-specific (Gemenne et al. 2014; Chapter 28, this volume).

An overarching theme has been that, to a significant extent, policymaking needs have driven EMD research. Whilst there are many researchers in the field who pursue EMD research from the scholarly tradition of curiosity-based inquiry, a net benefit to all researchers working in this specialty field is that policymakers have an active interest in what they have to say. The common complaint of researchers in other fields and disciplines, and particularly in migration studies – that their work goes unnoticed by governments, decision makers, the media and the general public – does not apply here. The high-quality research that has been done in the past decade or so has successfully persuaded policymakers and the concerned public that environmental change, mobility, migration patterns, and human security can no longer be thought of in isolation. Further, policymakers’ need for high quality EMD research continues to grow. We see this in the evolution of the UNFCCC process, where the 2016 Paris Agreement set into motion, through Article 50, a process to recommend to signatory states how to proceed with respect to population displacements attributable to climate change. We also see it in the many other international policy arrangements being developed to respond to people displaced for environmental reasons, through initiatives such as the Platform on Disaster Displacement (Chapter 34, this volume) and the increasing engagement of multilateral organizations and agencies in EMD policymaking and programming (see chapters by UNHCR, IOM, UNEP, and World Bank, later this volume).

Although the volume of EMD research and the attention given to it have exploded in a relatively brief period of time, the ways in which we currently think about and represent EMD have a much longer history of development. Geographer David Livingstone (2000) has observed that western thinking about the human-environment relationship traces through the Enlightenment, Renaissance, and on back to the ancient Greeks; we will not here dig so far into the past. However, we do in the following pages wish to trace the more recent evolution in EMD research and thinking, describing briefly contributors and conceptual developments that are critical to what we today believe EMD to be and to how we came to such an understanding.¹ We also offer a brief synopsis of what we believe to be important current trends and questions of interest to researchers, recognizing that the following thirty-plus chapters in this book will unpack these in far greater detail.

Origins and evolution of EMD research and scholarship

Current views on the relationship between migration and the natural environment have been influenced by a much older scholarship. Although a complete book might be written on the subject, we here wish to highlight some of the more important factors and contributors to its longitudinal development. Readers wanting to read additional, more detailed treatments of the development of EMD research (and critiques of it) may wish to consult Bettini and Gioli (2016), Gemenne (2011a), McLeman (2014, 2016), and Piguet (2013), among others.

Ravenstein’s laws of migration

Contemporary migration scholarship (of any type) in the western tradition traces its theoretical and methodological origins to the work of Georg Ravenstein and a series of publications he wrote between 1885 and 1889 under the title, “The Laws of Migration”. Using British census data as his evidence base, Ravenstein (1889) described a number of generalized characteristics about migration which, after updating the language, can be summarized as follows:

• most migration takes place over relatively short distances
• migration tends to flow from rural areas to urban centres
• the longer the distance travelled, the more likely the migrant is destined to an urban center
• migration in one direction tends to generate return flows of migrants in the opposite direction
• there are gendered differences in migration, with men being more likely to undertake international migration than women
• longer distance migration is more likely to be undertaken by individuals than by entire households
• urban centres grow more by in-migration than by natural increase
• improvements in transportation technology and infrastructure facilitate greater amounts of migration
• most causes of migration are economic in nature

Despite the use of the term ‘laws’, none of these statements are universally accurate (nor were they even in Ravenstein’s day), and with the passage of time, many of them are now recognized as being gross simplifications that are unreflective of the complex, multi-scale processes that influence migration patterns and behaviour. Nonetheless, Ravenstein’s work remains influential today on migration scholarship in general and on EMD research in particular, in three important ways. First, Ravenstein’s work represents the first systematic attempts to develop broad explanations of migration patterns and behavior on the basis of empirical evidence, an approach that stands in considerable contrast with many of his contemporaries (see ahead). In doing so, Ravenstein anticipated the ‘grounded theory’ approach to developing theory on the basis of empirical evidence that is widely used today by social scientists (Charmaz 2004), and established the practice of using census and similar statistical data in demographic and migration research, including EMD research (Fussell et al. 2014).

Second, although there are many obvious exceptions to Ravenstein’s ‘laws’, a great many of his statements remain accurate more often than not. Most migration today does indeed flow from rural areas to urban centers (Samers 2010). Far more people migrate within countries t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Robert McLeman and François Gemenne
• Foreword by Mary Robinson
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Part I Existing knowledge, theories and methods
• Part II Empirical evidence from regions
• Part III Legal and policy considerations
• Index