World leaders will gather in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt this weekend for the beginning of COP27, the UN’s two-week climate change summit. The annual conference will primarily serve as an opportunity to check in on the Glasgow Climate Pact, devised at last year’s summit in Scotland, which called for countries to “revisit and strengthen” their greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by the end of 2022, with the ultimate goal of keeping global temperatures no more than 1.5°C warmer than in pre-industrial times. The results have been lackluster. Last week, the UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, bemoaned that the planet was “nowhere near the scale and pace” necessary to meet that goal. A warmer world will certainly affect how, whether, and where people migrate. As part of our Migration Information Source special issue on climate change, Alex de Sherbinin explained how climate factors have historically played a role in population movements and the subtle ways that drought, flooding, and other events contribute to migration. MPI’s podcast Changing Climate, Changing Migration is exploring the issue from multiple angles, and we are working on new episodes to dive deeper. If more evidence were needed of the growing entanglement between climate change and human movement, events of the last few months have demonstrated how acutely severe weather forces people out of their homes. In Pakistan, 32 million people were displaced by floods in September. Last month, floods displaced millions more in Nigeria, South Sudan, and elsewhere. Many people moved to nearly shelters and returned after a short while, but repeated disasters can be a powerful motivator for people to migrate permanently. It is unlikely that climate migration will be a major topic of discussion in Egypt next week, with COP27 seemingly set to focus on adaptation strategies and the financing needed to protect people from devastating climate impacts. But migration is sometimes described as a form of adaptation in response to climate change, and financing to prevent displacement or support people migrating in response to climate change ought to be a part of this conversation, my colleague Lawrence Huang recently argued. Egypt would seem like a particularly apt place for this conversation to occur. The country is famously dependent on the Nile’s waters, yet a combination of factors including drought, rising sea levels. and the climate-related spread of agricultural pests are having a devastating impact on rural farmers, which may push many to move to urban centers. Often, discussions on migration and climate change happen in separate silos, with few bridges connecting the two. Silence on climate migration at COP27 would be further evidence of that divide. Yet as climate change remakes our world, one of its most pronounced effects will be the ways that it encourages people to migrate and traps those who might be better off migrating elsewhere. Declining to address that reality only makes the situation harder. Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
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