Publications

Scholarly understanding of the relationship between climate change and human migration and displacement has expanded greatly in the last two decades. There is general agreement that migration is one of a range of outcomes that may emerge as households and communities cope with and adapt to climatic risks and hazards. Migration decisions are highly context-specific and vary according to interactions between economic, political, social, cultural, demographic, and other factors that operate across scale to create vulnerability and adaptive capacity (Black et al. 2011). Migration outcomes reflect a continuum of agency, from voluntary movement to involuntary displacement (Hugo 2011), and include immobile populations that may be unable to migrate in the face of high exposure to climatic risks because they lack the necessary means or opportunities (sometimes referred to as “trapped populations”, (see Adger et al. 2015)) as well as groups that are reluctant to move due to strong attachments to place associated with economic, cultural, and/or social ties (Adams 2016; Zickgraf 2019).
Scholarship on climate-migration has evolved somewhat independently from other fields of climate change impact scholarship, and this is reflected in successive generations of IPCC assessment reports that use a risk framing not found in most climate-migration literature. Policy makers’ concerns about climate change impacts on migration have grown in recent years, creating demand for greater treatment of it in IPCC and other scientific assessment reporting. This in turn generates a need for a common conceptual foundation that links climate-migration research to wider climate change risk framings, to facilitate dialogue between researchers and policy makers. To this end, as active participants in assessing scholarship on migration and (im)mobility for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, we offer a new conceptual framing of the links between climate change risks and migration.
Original article DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03056-6. Affiliations were missing from the article. The original publication has been corrected.