"Resilient people migrate to capture adaptation opportunity. Vulnerable people migrate to avoid climate crisis," wrote Koko Warner, head of the environmental migration section at the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS).
The above perfectly captures the problems that might arise in the future and it is important to understand the mechanism behind the theory of climate change led migration. The discourse are usually in two extremes; the alarmist and the skeptics. The wider media usually take the view of the alarmist since it makes a better story.
Alarmist
The alarmist believes that the observed increased number of environmental hazard (few of the examples displayed in previous entries) have believed to have led to mass displacement (Hunter 2005) and these will be region concern. Myers (2002) had predicted that by the end of the century there will be 200 million environmental refugees. They believed that that "migration is not only a consequence of environmental degradation but represents a catastrophe in itself (Piguet 2013). It is likely that extreme events (as i have talked about like the hurricane examples) and mean temperature, rainfall, sea level changes will all contribute to increases in mobility for reasons I have explored previously.
One reason that this has became a pressing issue is because of the prospect of million of climate refugees moves from the poor to rich nations. Could this happen? A rather alarmist paper by Reuveny (2007) shows a list of 38 cases of environmental migration as evidence that support the alarmist argument. (please refer to page 664 for details). The analysis backs up the claims by the alarmist that LDCs are more vulnerable, and several environmental factors like land degradation, drought, deforestation, water scarcity, floods, storms and famines are all present in these cases with large degradation representing the largest share of incidences. More importantly, 19/38 showed intrastate migrations, 6 involved interstate migration and 13 cases involved both. Reuveny (2007) presented a strong case and has given evidence that climate change induced migration will led to migration between international borders and in some instances contributes (not a singular cause) to conflicts.
Skeptics
The skeptic believed that these alarmist are under-looking the role of governments. Firstly, the view that alarmist undermines Western Governments hostile attitude towards migrates. Secondly, skeptics are denying that the western countries would assist the victims of climate change. In essence, they believe the skeptics are focused on the mechanical flow between environmental risk and equating that to population risk and displacement, without taking into consideration of the societal factors like past experiences, local governmental and culture. In turn, simplifying the model of climate-migration and underscoring the complexity of socio-environmental factor.
Tacoli (2009) acknowledge that migration would happen but would not be in the hundreds of millions, implicated by alarmist. Tacoli (2009) also argues that traditionalist view of migration from poor to rich (trans-boundary migration) and rural to urban (within countries) have to be changed. He argues a better understanding of these socio-economic effect would help analysis how other elements would affect migration. In turn a more complex view is given and more research is needed.
Conclusion
So after all the background view, what would happen in the future? would migration lead to the mass displacement has the alarmist had suggest? or would the skeptic be right? I have given a balance view and in turn you can decide which spectrum you believe it to be, but I believe that more research are needed within this sector because insufficient data means modelling would be less accurate. At the same time, both skeptics and alarmist noticed that migration will occur due to climate change. But the dispute comes within the numbers of migration, the scale and lastly the ability for governments to reduce vulnerability climate change and thus amount of migration
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