Groundswell

Migration influenced by environmental change in Africa: A systematic review of empirical evidence

“…With regard to the spatial dimension of movements, 32 of the case studies focused on internal migration, 4 on international migration, and 16 considered both types of migration. A strong focus on internal migration reflects the established scientific evidence, including from beyond Africa, that migration in the context of environmental change is mostly short distance and occurring within a country (Rigaud et al 2018). Regarding the operationalisation of migration in the reviewed articles, we identify three patterns which are strongly linked to the methodological approach employed.…”

“…There is no conclusive evidence regarding the direction and magnitude of the influence of environmental change on migration, which can range from playing a limited and rather indirect role (de Haas 2011) to having significant impacts (Marchiori and Schumacher 2011). The recent World Bank report which warns that climate change will be a major driver of future internal migration flows in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America provides an example of the difficulty of estimating and predicting the number of environmental migrants (Rigaud et al 2018). There is indeed a high degree of uncertainty as reflected in a wide range of the numbers of climate migrants estimated in different scenarios: between 91 and 143 million in the pessimistic scenarios and between 31 and 71 million in the climate-friendly scenarios (Rigaud et al 2018).…”

“…The recent World Bank report which warns that climate change will be a major driver of future internal migration flows in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America provides an example of the difficulty of estimating and predicting the number of environmental migrants (Rigaud et al 2018). There is indeed a high degree of uncertainty as reflected in a wide range of the numbers of climate migrants estimated in different scenarios: between 91 and 143 million in the pessimistic scenarios and between 31 and 71 million in the climate-friendly scenarios (Rigaud et al 2018). What is consistent across all scenarios is the fact that the numbers of potential migrants are predicted to be the highest in Africa.…”

Agent-based modeling of environment-migration linkages: a review

“…The authors conclude that migration is largely driven by mean municipality income being a function of climate change, water availability, and agricultural yields. In a recent study, Rigaud et al (2018) integrated the shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) narratives in a gravity model to estimate flows of people who left their home because of sea level rise, water availability, and crop productivity decline. Modeling results show that by 2050, approximately 140 million people across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia could be forced to move within their own countries as consequence of climate change.…”

Planned relocation and everyday agency in low‐lying coastal villages in Fiji

“…Further, the intention is not to position villagers as adaptive agents who bear responsibility for coping with climate impacts and relocation processes (Bettini et al, 2017). As a matter of climate justice, the primary challenge is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions drastically (Barnett & McMichael, 2018;Rigaud et al, 2018). Indeed, Fiji's first stated priority for the 2017 COP23 (23rd annual Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Presidency was to "preserve the multilateral consensus for decisive action to address the underlying causes of climate change" (COP23 Presidency Secretariat, 2017).…”