Samvat Bhardwaj, Pehr Nayak, Uditi Kalra
Climate Migration: Multi-causality in Status Quo
For too long, due to human prioritization of convenience and growth at the planet's expense, the implications of environmental change have only worsened the situation for forced climate migrants.
Climate change, in modern discourse, is an accepted phenomenon resulting from the industrialization of the human species over the past hundred and fifty years. However, if one proceeds beyond the colloquial understanding of climate change, the issue will appear much more fragmented: the underlying principles and mechanisms motivating the flux, the exact number of stakeholders involved and the degree of the effect on them make the empirical study of anything remotely climate a tall order for econometricians.
Migration presents itself as the primary second-order effect of climate change. There are particularly multi-causal determinants of migration. Any forced migratory movement takes place after the convergence of factors that environmental stress is always mixed with. These causes may include economic constraints, social networks (or specific actions transmitting through them) and political contexts.
Furthermore, because climate change extenuates pre-existing issues, it often acts as the last straw at the camel’s back, not particularly the main cause of migration. For example, a moderate to extreme hurricane might end up straining the logistics and infrastructure of a region making food scarce and vulnerable to pre-existing regional epidemics.
Climate change is a complex environmental process that does not have uniform consequences everywhere. Stressed societies, particularly, have always had to adapt to changing environmental contexts. The number of variables in the characterization of this policy issue is therefore important, leading to high uncertainty and local variability.
Burden and Scope of Policy
In this document, we hope to highlight States’ responses to the movement of actors, the long-term effect of diaspora on the polity, economy and ethnographic resilience of the recipient State and provide some recommendations on best policies in the context of forced climate migrants.
Stakeholder Identification:
The Climate Migrant - The location of the diaspora formation depends largely on the needs of the primary stakeholders- The Migrants’. The characteristics vary based on the kind of displacement, geographical conditions, the needs of the forced climate migrants and the economic status of the host and the source country. The extent of their vulnerability helps largely in shaping the diaspora. For example, some migrants may seek temporary relocation, while others might be forced into permanent settlement in an alien world.
The Host: The secondary stakeholder - The Host Country’ plays a crucial role in managing the influx of migrants. The capacity of the host to integrate migrants is influenced by its economic conditions and immigration policies. The highest impact is faced by them.
The debate surrounding migrants' contribution to the workforce leading to economic growth sounds valid. However, the discussions over the same are often powered by the host country's willingness and ability to accommodate the migrants , this often comes from a lack of available resources.
The host state often faces Cultural shock because, the native population having their own cultural identity and beliefs are usually met with Migrants who take with them religious practices, rituals, political ideologies, and social and family structures. This does not align perfectly with societal structures.
The Source - Another important stakeholder are ‘The Source country’, the home country of the climate migrants, often middle to low-income countries that depict relatively low climate-altering emissions. Their economic and geopolitical state is usually poorer than the Host country.
Diaspora: Either Leverage or Crutch
Host
The diaspora, in the long-term view, can act as a major asset, if accommodated and managed well. The diaspora allows the host country to have significant leverage in terms of human resources, trade, and cultural osmosis if we look at the problem from a benign point. If the diaspora feels alienated or ends up being hostile, the host will continue to have an insurgent population mingled very well with their population. This not only creates social upheaval but long-term security threats to the Host State.
Source
For the source state, a well-adjusted diaspora in a foreign nation opens multiple avenues of favourable trade, education and remittance. The native population in the source country may also exploit the diaspora as a social network to expand their roots greatly in the host country. A persecuted, marginalized diaspora would often invite serious reprimand from the host state. Further, the host state, if in conflict (economic, social, political, armed) may take punitive action against the source state; who in turn might have had no involvement in the actions of the diaspora.
Policy Recommendations:
Since the onus of action and multigenerational long-term effect exists just for these two:
Host State:
Immigration and Border Policies: In a lot of instances the arrival of foreign migrants acts as a burden on the welfare state, civic structures and infrastructure capacity of the native population in the host state. This creates natural rifts between the two populations even if ethno-religious ones didn’t exist earlier.
To address this the host State must try to monitor, if not regulate, and channelize the immigration and prevent new conflicts on socio-ethnic lines to disrupt both between the natives and the migrants and also among the migrants.
Long-term people-to-people integration: The State is to facilitate people-to-people exchange from the grassroots level. This is very easily achieved by making sure diaspora communities, even if ghettoized, should have constant intermixing and osmosis with the native population.
This may be easily achieved through thoughtful urban planning and directed social services and welfare state activities.
Infrastructure: To accommodate the rapidly increasing count of forced climate migrants, it becomes an extensively tedious job for the host state and its residents to simply even accommodate them. This requires the state to expand its infrastructural capacity.
Because most of the long-term settlement for forced migrants often happens around pre-existing urban centres, sustainable and resilient urban planning that limits clusterization would be best suited.
Urban planning and architecture must also be conceived in a way that allows for the diaspora (which may end up isolating itself) to at least feel included within the public space and experience a degree of freedom, with both movement and trade.
Security and post-stress/trauma peacebuilding: The forced migrant population may not necessarily be able to adapt to the varying cultural shock brought about by this movement. That is a natural response to adaptation. This adaptation might prove much more painful and time-consuming due to the effect of community-wide trauma and stress.
To address this, grassroots community engagement along with access to credible and financially feasible primary healthcare will go a long way.
If financially/logistically possible access to community support groups, created among the migrant population will also allow for the community to be much more resilient and less likely to switch to organized crime.
Clarity in post-incident long term response: The idea is to let the migrant population be aware of the fate the host state has planned for them. This can either be the return of these migrants to their source country, resetting them in another geographical region within the host country or even employment/vocation programs as a means of normalization. Whichever of these best fits the context should be communicated as limbo and information asymmetry only adds to the stress and uncertainty on the migrant community.
Source State:
Long-Term Climate adaptation: Projects that improve infrastructure, energy provision, and diversify livelihoods can help people adapt to climate impacts in places they are very prone to. This can reduce the need for migration, especially in areas with high outmigration rates.
Economic tweaking: To start implementing fiscal and public policies that may address the root causes of the climate migrants’ plight. Climate change itself may not be addressed by the actions of one state, but as addressed earlier climate migration happens because of a nexus of events.
International Advocacy: International organizations working to advocate the agenda must protect climate migrants and the source state to address the adverse effects of extreme conditions at the right time. i. This could happen through preventing the cause at the right time, panel discussions in international conferences could easily advocate for smaller regions that are being struck by climate change.
Addressing human resource depletion (Brain drain): To keep citizens within the Source State, they must actively work on bettering the standard of living by approaching this with a multifaceted viewpoint.
Increasing educational and professional opportunities and mitigating inaccessibility to respective resources.
References
About the Author(s)
Samvat Bhardwaj is a second year economics and IR major with the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. His areas of research interests include defence, national security, macro policy and geopolitics.
Pehr Nayak is a first-year Economics student with a keen interest in sustainability, financial inclusion, and economic policy. She is passionate about understanding how economic systems can drive positive social and environmental impact.
Uditi is a first year undergraduate student at The Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, pursuing Economics (Hons). Her areas of interest include Indian Democracy, Consumer Behaviour, Neuroscience and Indian Mythology.
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