Migration and the Environment (original) (raw)
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Human migration and the environment
Population and Environment, 2010
Environmental factors have shaped human migration since the origin of Homo sapiens. Indeed, the relationship between migration and the environment has been at the core of population-environment studies. Further, fueled by contemporary concerns with the impacts of global climate change on human populations, substantial public and policy dialogue has inspired additional scholarship on the migration-environment connection. This collection of manuscripts has been crafted to add to the intellectual foundation underpinning that dialogue. This issue of Population & Environment presents new research on the complex and layered links between human migration and the environment, examining the effects of environmental change on migration patterns as well as the impacts of migration dynamics on environmental conditions in sending and receiving regions. Papers in this special issue address such topics from a number of different theoretical and methodological perspectives. The contributions also interrogate other important dimensions of this association such as those related to gender, ethnicity, and social, economic and cultural institutions. In addition, a variety of geographic settings and social contexts is represented, focusing on push and pull factors in sending and receiving areas through examination of both internal and international migration. We are convinced that contributions on internal migration represent a revitalizing view calling attention to the fact that, without denying the relevance of international movements, much environmental displacement takes place within countries. Further, we argue that more research attention must be paid
The effect of environmental change on human migration
Global Environmental Change, 2011
The influence of the environment and environmental change is largely unrepresented in standard theories of migration, whilst recent debates on climate change and migration focus almost entirely on displacement and perceive migration to be a problem. Drawing on an increasing evidence base that has assessed elements of the influence of the environment on migration, this paper presents a new framework for understanding the effect of environmental change on migration. The framework identifies five families of drivers which affect migration decisions: economic, political, social, demographic and environmental drivers. The environment drives migration through mechanisms characterised as the availability and reliability of ecosystem services and exposure to hazard. Individual migration decisions and flows are affected by these drivers operating in combination, and the effect of the environment is therefore highly dependent on economic, political, social and demographic context. Environmental change has the potential to affect directly the hazardousness of place. Environmental change also affects migration indirectly, in particular through economic drivers, by changing livelihoods for example, and political drivers, through affecting conflicts over resources, for example. The proposed framework, applicable to both international and internal migration, emphasises the role of human agency in migration decisions, in particular the linked role of family and household characteristics on the one hand, and barriers and facilitators to movement on the other in translating drivers into actions. The framework can be used to guide new research, assist with the evaluation of policy options, and provide a context for the development of scenarios representing a range of plausible migration futures.
Focus on environmental risks and migration: causes and consequences
Environmental Research Letters, 2015
Environmental change poses risks to societies, including disrupting social and economic systems such as migration. At the same time, migration is an effective adaptation to environmental and other risks. We review novel science on interactions between migration, environmental risks and climate change. We highlight emergent findings, including how dominant flows of rural to urban migration mean that populations are exposed to new risks within destination areas and the requirement for urban sustainability. We highlight the issue of lack of mobility as a major issue limiting the effectiveness of migration as an adaptation strategy and leading to potentially trapped populations. The paper presents scenarios of future migration that show both displacement and trapped populations over the incoming decades. Papers in the special issue bring new insights from demography, human geography, political science and environmental science to this emerging field.
Routledge International Handbook of Human Migration Studies, 2nd Ed. (S. Nawyn & S. Gold, Eds.)
It is now widely recognized that climate change will reconfigure our physical and social landscapes in ways that we are just beginning to understand, and that it will directly and indirectly influence human migration patterns across geographic regions and the socio-economic spectrum. Exactly how climate change will affect migration, what climate-related migration will look like, and how scholars might go about studying it, however, remain points of contention. In this chapter, we identify some key threads in the burgeoning literature on climate change and human migration, including the influence of climate change on migration decisions and patterns, the challenges of empirically measuring and predicting the scale of climate migration, the likely patterns climate migration will take, and some of the looming governance and human rights questions posed by climate migration. Additionally, because both climate change and migration occur within a dynamic and highly unequal social, political, and economic landscape, we highlight some of the ways in which some communities are rendered more vulnerable than others in the face of both climate change and climate migration, as well as the ways in which such vulnerability is produced and perpetuated.
The State of Environmental Migration 2018: A review of 2017
2016
This volume is the eight in the annual series and the third of its kind published with the Presses Universitaires de Liège. The State of Environmental Migration aims to provide its readership with the most updated assessments on recent events and evolving dynamics of environmental migration throughout the world. Each year, the editors select the best graduate student work from the course “Environment and Migration”, taught by François Gemenne and Caroline Zickgraf at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) of Sciences Po. Presented in this edition are displacements induced by some of the most dramatic disaster events of 2017, including Hurricane Irma and Cyclone Enawo, as well as analyses of migration flows related to a variety of environmental occurrences throughout the year spanning the globe. SEM 2018 thus represents another stepping stone towards understanding how the adverse effects of climate change and disasters alter migration patterns.