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November 17, 2020

Have You Read?

Climate Change, Displacement, and Managed Retreat in Coastal India

No Retreat: Climate Change and Voluntary Immobility in the Pacific Islands

With Millions Displaced by Climate Change or Extreme Weather, Is There a Role for Labor Migration Pathways?

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New from MPI

Managing the Pandemic and Its Aftermath: Economies, Jobs, and International Migration in the Age of COVID-19
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou

At the Starting Gate: The Incoming Biden Administration’s Immigration Plans
By Doris Meissner and Michelle Mittelstadt

Media Corner

MPI has released the updated version of the Immigration Data Matters Guide co-published with the Population Reference Bureau. This handy resource directly links users to more than 250 migration data resources from authoritative sources, organized by topic.

Journalist Rosalind Russell follows three South Sudanese refugees who fled to Uganda in The End of Where We Begin: A Refugee Story.

Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry, edited by Siobhán McGuirk and Adrienne Pine, focuses on for-profit dimensions of the global asylum system.

Magdalena Suerbaum’s Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East: Syrian Refugees in Egypt, offers an ethnographic study of Syrian men in Cairo.

In Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa, Kelsey P. Norman examines how host countries treat migrants and refugees.

A new documentary, The Last Out, traces three Cuban baseball players who come to the United States.

Feature
Impacts of Climate Change as Drivers of Migration
Climate change is affecting human movement now, causing internal displacement and international migration, and will do so in the future. But the impact is often indirect, and rarely is the process as straightforward as one might think. This article provides an overview of research on how climatic hazards drive and affect migration, reviewing which types of people might migrate and under what conditions.

Feature
In Relatively Peaceful Tanzania, Climate Change and Migration Can Spur Conflict
Climate-induced migration can lead to tensions and violence between host communities and new arrivals. This conflict can flare up at various levels, including among rural farmers and herders in relatively peaceful countries such as Tanzania.

Editor's Note

Climate change is affecting human migration. The direct linkages are complicated and it is debatable precisely how many people will leave their homes solely as a result of hurricanes, encroaching drought, or other climate events, given the often-interwoven reasons for migration. But researchers have widely acknowledged that changing weather and environmental conditions have an impact on people’s movement.

In coming decades, there may be no single issue that affects as many people as profoundly as climate change and related competition for scarce resources, societal tensions, and political instability. From typhoons in South Asia to drought in the Middle East, climate migration—or at least migration amid climate change—is already here, and it is likely to become more pronounced as the effects of climate change get more extreme.

Given its growing importance, the Migration Policy Institute’s Migration Information Source is launching a special series focusing on climate migration. In the articles already published and those yet to come, our authors separate fact from fiction and trace out the complicated ways in which climate change intersects with human movement. Like migration generally, mobility in the face of climate impacts is neither inherently good nor bad, but it can lead to a range of outcomes depending on the circumstances under which it occurs and how it is managed. The top researchers gathered for this special issue explore the possibilities.

In companion with the special issue, I am thrilled to unveil a new podcast called Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Through deep and wide-ranging conversations with an array of researchers, our hope is to examine climate migration from all angles. The first episode, with Columbia University geographer Alex de Sherbinin, is available now. In coming episodes, I will be drilling down on particular questions, individual country and region case studies, and the changing dynamics of migration in the midst of climate change.

This is an exciting new project from MPI, and I hope followers of the Source will read, listen, and explore. Subscribe to the podcast through your app of choice, and please leave us a review. If you have questions, comments, or criticism, please reach out to me at [email protected]. I would love to hear which elements you are enjoying and what we can do better.

Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected]

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The Migration Information Source is a project of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank in Washington, DC dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide.