Governments risk adopting policies that increase people’s vulnerability to climate change due to general prejudice against migration.
Instead social and economic factors play a bigger role in who moves, where they move to and for how long — and most movements are of short durations and short distances.
This was contained in a research published on February 4, 2011 by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) which refutes alarmist predictions about hundreds of millions of people being forced to migrate across international borders because of climate change.
The research which was made available to the GNA, includes case studies from Bolivia, Senegal and Tanzania, and found no evidence that environmental degradation linked to climate change would result in large inflows of international migrants.
“People affected by environmental degradation rarely moved across borders,” says the study’s author Dr Cecilia Tacoli, stressing “Instead they moved to other rural areas or to local towns, often temporarily.”
“Such migrants could reduce their vulnerability by diversifying their sources of income and reducing their dependence on natural resources, but governments often view migrants as a problem and either provide little support or actively discourage them from moving,” she observed.
The study urged governments to understand the social and economic factors that shape migration so they could develop policies that would support the strategies poor people use to adapt to environmental degradation.
Dr Tacoli said, “Policymakers need to redefine migration and see it as a valuable adaptive response to environmental risks and not as a problem that needs to be tackled.”
“We need rational, realistic responses to climate-change, not knee-jerk reactions that create new problems and increase vulnerability,” she added.
The study proposed policies for governments in climate-vulnerable countries to protect livelihoods in migrants’ home areas, with specific attention to ensuring access to land.
It recommended support for migrants at destination, making sure that they had adequate representation and that their rights were respected and avoid vicious cycles, whereby migration was the consequence not of climate change itself, but of policies created to address climate change.
The study noted that when people move internationally they often invested in their home countries in ways that could further have an impact on internal movement.
This is because such investments tend to be made in areas with potential for economic growth and, in many cases, in non-agricultural activities, such as construction and businesses in urban centres, especially in small and intermediate ones where land is cheaper.
Also, when international migrants send money home this could be used to pay temporary labourers to work on family farms.
These sectors are major employers of temporary migrants from environmentally fragile areas and could reduce people’s vulnerability to climate change.
“Both the relatively common internal migration and the relatively rare international migration could support poor people who are at risk from climate change,” says Dr Tacoli, emphasising “Migration is part of the solution, not part of the problem as many people thought.”