Cross-Disciplinary Conversation Must Be Our Priority – Reflections on Climate Displacement and Migration from CFD Director of Programs Marina Lazetic
Boston University’s Initiative on Cities and the University of Toronto’s School of Cities organized a workshop on climate displacement in Toronto on September 28th. I traveled to present the Center on Forced Displacement’s research on climate-related migrations and displacement. The goal of this workshop was to bring scholars from different disciplines together to share their research and discuss theoretical and methodological approaches to displacement. Six presenters shared their work ranging from urban displacement in Pakistan to economic modeling predicting future movements due to climate change. A scholar from Bangladesh spoke about resilient livelihoods as an intervention to address climate displacement, while others spoke about climate-related displacement in Canada and the United States. Each presentation sparked a discussion that led to one key conclusion – scholars working on the issues at the nexus of climate and migration must talk more across disciplines and geographies.
On behalf of the Center on Forced Displacement, I had a chance to present the questions we are addressing through a systematic review of literature on the climate-migration nexus including:
- Are people truly moving more as a result of climate change?;
- What is the impact of climate change on immobility?;
- Do people migrate or stay in place voluntarily or involuntarily?;
- What are the research gaps we need to fill in order to propose and advocate for better policies that help the most impacted communities?
What inspired us to engage in this systematic review was a sense of disconnect between the disciplines and the strong focus on hyper-mobilization narratives predicting large movements of people from the “global South” to the “global North.”
When I first started working on the topic of climate displacement, as part of our work at the Fletcher School’s Climate Policy Lab, Professor Karen Jacobsen and I produced a white paper that looks at climate displacement in the US and provides lessons for policymakers. This project highlighted the fact that even in the wealthiest countries, the most vulnerable communities carry the brunt of climate change and do not get adequate assistance as systemic inequities exist in climate-related projects and programs as well. The main finding of our paper echoes the findings of many researchers and scholars who have been writing about climate displacement: climate displacement in the United States disproportionately impacts low-income, non-white, and indigenous communities. This is particularly worrisome because research also suggests that the current structure of federal assistance provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) often deepens existing inequities. As the main source of post-disaster funding, FEMA focuses primarily on the recovery and reconstruction of property, which favors homeowners and wealthier individuals. This means that households whose property values are higher are likely to get a lot more funding which makes it easier for people in wealthier neighborhoods to rebuild, invest in protective infrastructure, or decide to sell their property and move away. Households with lower property values or renters are then at risk of repeated displacement and moving from one vulnerable area to another, facing permanent housing insecurity.
Some of the most vulnerable communities whose resources are continually depleted by disasters are also facing risks of being “stuck” in involuntary immobility and unable to leave at-risk areas. This brings the crucial questions about the assumptions we are operating on and the narratives and hierarchies of power they support. For example, if we assume that climate-impacted people will move as a strategy of adaptation, are we giving up on mitigation and accepting negative impacts as a foregone conclusion when they could actually be addressed before communities are forced to move and prevent their displacement? Or, if we assume that the most economically depleted communities get “stuck” as a result of worsening climate conditions, how do we explain the migration of Indigenous people from Guatemala who have decided to leave their homes after repeated climate-related disasters?
Conversation across disciplines can provide clarity on these questions and establish research paradigms and policy agendas. For example, our workshop in Toronto clearly demonstrated that while economic models might predict large movements of people as a result of climate change, we do not need to accept migration as a given and mobility as the only viable adaptation strategy or future scenario in every situation. Disciplines not often associated with climate and migration can help us consider the fact that place attachment, including community attachment, can play a huge role in someone’s desire to move or stay, despite increasing climate risks. The hypermobility narratives warning of large numbers of people who might move from the “global South” to the “global North” as a result of climate change are based on interesting and complicated models and an impressive amount of data. But they also play a role in policies that seek to prevent migration and restrict mobility. Analyzed and published in isolation, these models might cause more harm to the impacted communities, but if we invite colleagues from other disciplines to frame the findings in the specific historical, cultural, political, and social context, we are more likely to produce research that pushes against disciplinary limitations, creates innovative methodological approaches, and also benefits impacted communities. Interdisciplinary conversations help us imagine different futures and the research and policy agendas that help us reach these futures.