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The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Warming Up to Migration: Labor Mobility and Climate Change

    August 1, 2007 By Karima Tawfik

    Traveling across national borders to find work should be treated as a legitimate response to climate change, says the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Oli Brown in a new policy paper on climate change and labor mobility.

    Both Brown and ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko, who recently weighed in on climate change and migration on The New Security Beat, believe that climate change is an increasingly important driver of migration. However, it is difficult to isolate a causal relationship between climate change and migration because other factors—such as population growth, economics, and politics—are inextricably intertwined with climate’s impact on migration patterns. Brown and Dabelko both stress that the difficulties of measuring climate change’s effect on migration should not prevent policymakers from addressing the relationship between the two, however.

    Brown explains that labor migration has become an important coping strategy in drought-stricken Africa. During dry periods, young adults leave their rural homes and head for the cities, hoping to earn money for their families. Brown recommends increasing the flexibility of international migration laws to make it easier for people to travel across national borders to earn a living, but he also urges developing nations to curb the “brain drain” phenomenon by adopting incentives for workers to remain in their home countries. Moreover, he argues that wealthy developed countries, which tend to see migration as a failure of adaptation and often oppose relaxing immigration or refugee policies, should accept environmental stress as a legitimate reason for migration.

    Topics: climate change, humanitarian, migration
    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/16698593410502533615 Tom Deligiannis

      The literature on population and environment linkages has long recognized that migration (or labour mobility) – either temporary, semi-permanent, or permanent – is a livelihood adaptation strategy among small holder farmers and pastoralists to population and environmental change. As markets have gradually penetrated into rural areas over the past several hundred years, increasing numbers of small farmers use the dry seasons as an opportunity to earn off farm wages. So, there’s really nothing new in some of Brown’s observations, and we need to be aware of the variable nature of labour mobility.

      The environmental security literature has not recognized very well the variability and frequency of labour mobility as an adaptation strategy in confronting environmental scarcities. Too often, migration and environmental change – whether linked to climate change or more immediate human environmental impacts – is presented as resulting in permanent movements of people, often accross boarders.

      The interesting issue that emerges from climate change and labour mobility is whether the scale of labour mobility will increase significantly with increasingly widespread climate change impacts, who is most at risk from these climate impacts, and whether and how people will adapt to these stresses on their livelihoods.

      It’s these processes of adaptation, or failed adaptation that we need to examine closely for signs and indicators of causal links to insecurity and conflict.

      Tom Deligiannis

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