On environmental migration research

The jet lag has worn off from my trip last week to participate in a European Science Foundation-sponsored conference on environment and (human*) migration. It's a subject that European scholars and policymakers have been paying a fair bit of attention to in recent years, far more than on this side of the Atlantic. It was a fascinating conference, appealing to the true academic nerd in me. The conference covered a wide range of topics, from regional climate modeling to Foucault-inspired deconstructions of the hidden meanings that might be embedded in the term "environmental migration".

I was fascinated by the many presentations by scholars from developing nations (who must have made up at least 1/3 of those in attendance) describing empirical research into how adverse environmental events and conditions affect mobility, population displacements and migration patterns in their home countries. A lot of this research never makes it to scholarly journals (at least, not ones easily accessible here in North America), which is a real shame. The study of environmental migration, although it has been around for a while, is still relatively underdeveloped as compared with other areas of migration and mobility research. While it has been known by scholars since the days of Herodotus (if not earlier) that changing environmental conditions affect population movements, scholars are still trying to work out all the various potential linkages between ecological and socio-economic systems that influence migration. The more case studies we can assemble from different places, the better.

It was also really nice to be among scholars with expertise and interest in this field. There aren't a whole lot of people in North America doing research on environment and migration, even fewer on climate-related migration, a subject that interests me particularly. When you work on your own a lot, you can't help but start to wonder if the subject you're studying is as relevant as you think it is. In Canada, for example, each year there are all kinds of well-attended conferences and workshops on subjects such as how newcomers integrate when they arrive in Canadian cities, on the meaning of citizenship, on how certain social groups use and interpret urban space, and so on. Environmental themes tend not to crop up. And of course, there is an enormous amount of research being done on vulnerability and adaptation to climate change, but not many of us work at that interface between climate and migration research.

People in the security policy field show an interest in climate change and migration from time to time, often with the goal of trying to foresee how many people might be involuntarily displaced in the future and where they might end up going. While I am generally interested in such questions and have written about them, the research questions that most appeal to me are what others have described as socio-ecological ones. As a simple example, when you have a drought, why is it that the farm family on one side of the road quits farming and moves on while the family on other side of the road stays on? Is it because of some difference in the configuration of the family? Their farming skills? Access to credit? The amount of clay in their soil or the quality of the well water? Luck? Some farming choice made years previously that has come back to pay dividends or cause trouble? The possibilities are not necessarily endless, but they are many and are fascinating in their complexity. And gaining more insights into them is, in my view, an essential component in understanding what our world will look like in coming years. Happily, it seems a good number of researchers in Europe, Asia and Africa share my interests.

*I add the term "human" simply because there is a much larger body of research out there on the migration of organisms other than humans in response to environmental change.

Drought and Mexican migration

National Geographic News contacted me last week to ask for comments on a new study that suggests Mexican migration to the US rises whenever there's a drought in Mexico. It's an interesting study; the first of its kind so far as I'm aware. The authors based their findings on a statistical analysis of Mexico-US migration from 1995-2005 and compared it with climatic trends and crop yields in Mexico over the same time. The study's authors found that whenever crop yields went down significantly, migration to the US rose. The authors then go on to use their findings to predict how climate change might affect future Mexico-US migration. Taking model projections of future climate in Mexico, the authors suggest that an extra 1.4-6.7 million Mexicans might migrate to the US by 2080 because of climate-related crop losses. Here's the link to the original study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This study is one of the first I've seen that uses known migration and climate data to try and estimate the effect climatic events have on ongoing migration movements. There are studies that have estimated the number of people displaced by famines in East Africa, but that's a different scenario: in a famine, where you have people streaming out of the countryside to relief centres, it's relatively straightforward to make estimates of the number of people affected. But there was no famine in Mexico in the past 15 years; the countryside remained populated, relief centres were not established. Rather, what the authors were able to do was show that the regular and ongoing flow of cross-border migration responds to climate-related changes in crop yields.

This is rather important. Until now, most climate migration literature has focused on the 'environmental refugee' scenario of starving or flooded out millions fleeing areas rendered uninhabitable by extreme weather events, rising sea levels and the like. Many estimates are bandied about regarding how many climate change refugees we might expect in coming decades. The numbers range from tens of millions to a billion depending on the study you read. But most of those studies are back-of-the-envelope/best guess calculations.

Most migration worldwide does not occur as distress migration. People's motives for migrating vary considerably from one place to the next and from one household to the next. Climatic variables can and sometimes do play a role in household decision-making, but typically in concert with other social, economic and cultural influences. As a result, the greatest effects of climate change on human migration patterns are likely to be seen not in terms of the number of environmental refugees but on voluntary migration flows. Yes, environmental displacements will continue to occur; a surge in illegal migration by Hondurans to the US occurred in the months following 1999's Hurricane Mitch, for example. But the bigger numbers will be experienced as an increase in rates of rural-to-urban migration in developing nations - something that's very difficult to tease out empirically, since there are a lot of other factors also driving rural-to-urban migration.

A final observation is that while I'm pleased the authors were able to detect an association between crop failures and Mexico-US migration, I wish they had left it at that. There is so much inherent uncertainty in future climate models and in current migration data, when you add to it our complete inability to know future political, social and economic conditions in Mexico and the US, trying to predict climate-related migration over the next 70 years is a bit of a folly. Especially when the results come with falsely precise numbers like 1.4 and 6.7. Why not at least follow convention and round them, or simply state an order of magnitude (e.g. the extra migration is likely to number in the millions over coming decades)? Making predictions like this simply provides fuel to those who simply refuse to believe the science (see some of the comments on the National Geographic story to see what I mean) .

No climate conspiracy after all

Two days ago I posted that we should expect an increase in climate change reporting because of the extreme heat in Ontario and the soggy summer out west. Today's CBC Radio program The Current takes up this very point, asking if this is the "Pearl Harbour" moment that mobilizes action on climate change. I'll say no more on the that subject.

Climate change is also in the media today for another reason - the report of an official inquiry into the so-called "Climategate" in the UK, where e-mails had been stolen from a server used by climate scientists at the UK's University of East Anglia and selectively released on the internet in a way that made it seem the scientists had been faking their results (see my posting 19 December 2009). There's nothing the media loves more than a good conspiracy story, even if it is far-fetched and even if the so-called "evidence" consisted of internet postings supposedly revealing the contents of stolen e-mails. Honourable but anonymous thieves thieves uncover a Norwich-based conspiracy to deceive the world about a phantom menace despicably named "climate change" - how could that not raise global alarm bells? If only Peter Sellers were still alive, we could have sent Inspector Clouseau to get to the bottom of it!

But alas, in the absence of the late, great detective who stopped deranged Inspector Dreyfus from destroying the world, it was decided to instead establish an independent panel of inquiry to look into the matter. The findings were released today. And unsurprisingly, the inquiry found the British climate scientists guilty of no more than being overly prickly when questioned about their results. No surprise there: if you have ever dealt with academics, most are swell people, but there does remain a residual population of thin-skinned types who long for the good old Oxbridge/Ivy League days when professors were never questioned by anybody, and apparently the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia has its own fair share. But no scientific fraud nor conspiracy nor attempts to destroy civilization took place. It turns out the menace to global peace and stability is not a gaggle of rogue scientists, but that thing they were studying.

Get ready for more climate change in the Canadian media

Temperatures hit the mid-30s Celsius across much of southern Ontario and Quebec today, and are expected to do so for several more days before returning to more seasonal norms of the high 20s. Combined with an unusually wet summer on the Canadian Prairies, some heavy rainfall events and even a recent earthquake in Ottawa, expect any day now to see an upswing in reporting on climate change/global warming in the Canadian media.

Yes, I know, earthquakes are not climate-related, but the media doesn't mind - it all relates to the environment somehow, right? Summer is always a slow season for the news networks and papers, and especially now that the dust has settled on the G8/G20 circus and the gulf oil spill has become old news, there's nothing papers find easier to run than stories about the weather.

Which is what the current hot temperatures in Ontario and soggy conditions in Saskatchewan amount to - just the weather. They're not evidence of anything more than the fact that our daily livelihoods and activities are vulnerable to being disrupted by naturally-occurring events, just as they've always been. If we think the impacts of climate change aren't worth worrying about, consider the heat and rain a wake-up call. Or a reminder, if you're one of the majority of people who think, with good common sense, that it's unwise (and terribly wasteful) to transform the composition of the atmosphere as we're presently engaged in doing, and wonder about the negative impacts. And so they look to the media for stories about climate change and what can/ought to be done...

hmmm. An awkward full circle is reached. This week's weather has little to do with climate change (just as the home run hit yesterday by the Jays' Vernon Wells will have little impact on the outcome of their season) but at the same time it might stimulate the media to publish more climate change stories, which people might then read/listen to and thereby (perhaps) take a greater interest in doing something about it. The realpolitik of climate change would seem to dictate, then, that those hoping for action to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions should hope for hot weather in the media capitals and extreme weather events across the nation. But it works the other way as well: last summer (which was cool and wet across much of eastern Canada, and followed on the heels of a snowy winter) saw a swelling of smarmy "so whatever happened to global warming?" columns by the dullards of the op-ed sections and news network gab shows.

So to wrap up then: if the weather makes you think about climate change, good for you. But hopefully you also give it some thought even when there's something else newsworthy besides the weather.