Over the next three decades, as many as 216 million people could be internally displaced by climate change. Those are the findings of the World Bank’s recent Groundswell report, considered one of the most authoritative analyses of the impact of environmental change on internal and international migration.

Predicting future migration is notoriously difficult, particularly regarding climate change, as we have explored in our Changing Climate, Changing Migration podcast. But the Groundswell findings are worth digging into beyond the topline number. For instance, the report predicts that the largest internal migration will occur in sub-Saharan Africa and will be driven by slow-onset climate events, with different impacts in different places.

Water availability is expected to be the main driver of internal migration in North Africa, pushing people out of expected hotspots along the northeastern Tunisian and northwestern Algerian coasts, western and southern Morocco, and portions of Egypt’s Nile Delta. In Southeast Asia’s Lower Mekong, sea level rise and storm surge will push people out of some densely populated low-lying coastal areas.

Notably, the report, which builds on a 2018 publication, found that as much 80 percent of this internal movement could be avoided if countries cut global greenhouse gas emissions and take steps to mitigate the impacts of climate change. That could be a powerful argument at the two-week COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow next month.

The World Bank’s findings are about internal migration, but the impact of environmental change on international movement is something we have focused on at the Migration Information Source. We have a special collection of articles analyzing different dimensions of the climate change-migration nexus, and starting this week are back with new episodes of Changing Climate, Changing Migration, available on all the major podcasting platforms.  

Alex de Sherbinin, one of the authors of the Groundswell report, wrote a Source article looking at climate impacts as a driver of migration and also spoke with me for the podcast. Andrew Harper, the special adviser on climate action at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), also appeared on the podcast, and this week said his agency was preparing for the worst in terms of future climate impacts.

As climate change assumes a larger role in global political discussions, its impacts on migration will continue to be further analyzed. The decade-long movement of Haitian migrants across the Americas, for instance, may have a climate dimension, given the hurricanes and tropical storms that have ravaged Haiti. Whatever happens between now and 2050, climate change is a factor in migration.

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