CLIMATE MIGRATIONOn the Move: How Nations Address Climate-Driven Migration

Published 14 December 2021

One of the most consequential human responses to climate change is and will continue to be the mass movement of people. Rising temperatures which reduce agricultural opportunities can lead to mass migrations away from struggling communities. As the environmental impacts of climate change increase in scope and severity, more and more people will move to new places to preserve or enhance their lives and livelihoods. How do nations address, and plan to address, the growing wave of migrants fleeing their home countries in search for better living conditions?

Editor’s Note:
In October, the Biden administration released four reports — by DHS, the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Council — on how climate change-driven developments are posing an increasingly more serious challenge to global stability and to U.S. national security. Among these developments: worsening conflict within and between nations; increased dislocation and migration as people flee climate-fueled instability; heightened military tension and uncertainty; infrastructure destruction; worsening public health; food and water shortages; financial hazards, and more (see “National Security Consequences of Climate Change,” HSNW, 28 November 2021; “DHS Strategic Framework for Addressing Climate Change,” HSNW, 1 November 2021; and “Biden Administration Places Climate Change at the Center of U.S. Security Planning,” HSNW, 21 October 2021).

The authors of a new report from RAND say that one of the most consequential human responses to climate change is and will continue to be the mass movement of people. Rising temperatures which reduce agricultural opportunities can lead to mass migrations away from struggling communities.

“As the environmental impacts of climate change increase in scope and severity, more and more people will move to new places to preserve or enhance their lives and livelihoods. As individuals, families, and entire communities facing the fallout of a changing climate decide to relocate, it will transform the human geography of the planet. Some places that are thriving population centers today could become entirely uninhabitable, and other places may become better suited for large-scale human settlement,” the report notes.

International security scholars are beginning to address the growing problem of migration. In a recent article (“The World Has No Answer for Migration,” Foreign Policy, 30 November 2021), Stephen M. Walt analyzes the on-going confrontation between Belarus and the European Union over the fate of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Africa, and highlights it as but one example of how the current global political order is not set to deal with the increase in the movement of people across borders.

He writes:

At the most fundamental level, this episode (and many others) highlights the inability of the present global order to cope with large-scale movements of people. The current international system is based first and foremost on sovereign states exercising exclusive control over a certain specified territory.