* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Does climate-linked migration cause conflict?
By Anne Hammerstad
The impact of climate change on migration and conflict has in recent years been posited as one of the most serious challenges human society will face over the next few decades.
Suggestions that hundreds of millions of “environmental migrants” will be on the move by 2050 have been quoted by a variety of organizations ranging from government defence departments to humanitarian non-governmental organisations. Since such mass movement of people could strain local resources and upset local ethnic balances and communal cohesion where they arrive, it could become a core contributor to future conflict and insecurity.
Africa has been suggested as a region particularly prone to such destructive insecurity cycles between environmental degradation, population movement, and violent conflict. The war in Darfur has for instance been called “the world’s first climate change war”.
There are numerous problems with such alarmist scenarios. To start with, it is not possible to make a sound estimate of how many people may become displaced or choose to migrate due to climate change. Predicting migration flows is notoriously difficult, and separating out how many migrants will be ‘climate change migrants’ is even harder.
Global migration figures have been going up in recent decades, but their future trajectory will depend on a range of factors, not least the state of the world economy.
To suggest that there is a direct and strong causal link between climate change and population movement is to ignore the multi-causal nature of migration. Few decisions to migrate are based on only one factor, and environmental change will in most cases be only one of a variety of political, economic, social and individual reasons why people move.
Climate change may even hinder people from moving: It is usually not the poorest who become migrants, since migration requires resources. Since deteriorating environmental conditions can lead to impoverishment, some climate change affected populations may become less rather than more likely to relocate.
Of those who do move, only a small minority become international migrants. Most move within their own country - usually to the closest large city. In Africa, urbanisation is taking place at a furious pace and cities such as Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg are struggling to absorb the rural influx.
NEW PERIL IN CITIES
Paradoxically, rural migrants to urban areas can often move into, rather than out of, situations of environmental vulnerability, since many of the developing world’s fast-growing mega-cities are in flood-prone delta areas - and new arrivals tend to move to the least environmentally safe areas of cities.
These mega-cites already struggle to keep up with infrastructure and service provision for their inhabitants. Urban violence is on the rise in Africa, as was seen in the 2008 xenophobic riots in South Africa and the food riots in several African cities the same year.
A key future challenge will be how to manage the environmental, socio-economic and political challenges posed by escalating urban growth - regardless of whether this growth is caused by environmental degradation or a cocktail of factors that make people choose to move to cities.
The growth in urban violence is one way in which climate change related migration may contribute to instability. However, when migration (environmental or not) is linked to conflict, it is never the only, and usually not the most important, factor causing violence.
For instance, the targets of South Africa’s xenophobic riots were mostly African (and some internal) migrants, but the riots were a response to frustrations over unemployment and poor service delivery by the state, combined with a xenophobic view on immigration inherited from the apartheid period. This made immigrants easy targets for the venting of anger, rather than the “cause” of urban violence.
There is nothing inherent in migration movements causing conflict. A range of other factors will also need to be at play, such as pre-existing poisonous ethnic politics and tensions.
DARFUR NOT A CLIMATE CONFLICT?
The suggestion that the war in Darfur was a climate change conflict neglected the political causes of this conflict, not least the decades - if not centuries - of political abuse and misrule that preceded the outbreak of violence in the early 2000s. While drought may have played a role in exactly when the conflict was triggered, this does not mean that drought “caused” the conflict to happen.
We currently do not know enough about the relationship between climate change, migration and conflict. Alarmist scenarios have mostly been promoted not by migration or conflict experts but by climate scientists, who have not based their predictions on the state of the art of conflict and migration research.
A more nuanced understanding is currently emerging, where the potential challenges posed by climate change related migration are taken seriously, but alarmist and inaccurate predictions are avoided. This is desirable, since migrants who move in whole or in part due to environmental migration will be among the world’s most vulnerable people.
Threat scenarios can contribute to their movement being dealt with as an issue of national security rather than one of protection, sustainable growth, and development. Discourses of threat and fear may themselves contribute to violence and insecurity, as the xenophobic riots in South Africa showed.
Threat scenarios also underestimate the degree to which migration could be one of the many solutions - in terms of adaptability and resilience - to the challenges of climate change. Human mobility has always been a core strategy for adapting to change. It should be treated as such in policy debates on how to respond to climate change, rather than as a security issue.
Anne Hammerstad is an international relations researcher at the University of Kent and an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Global Uncertainties Fellow. This blog first appeared on Outreach, which focuses on the environment and sustainable development.
