Human Migration in the Face of Environmental Change: A Global Empirical Approach
Disaster forces millions of people to move away from their homes every year. Many more move in the face of gradual environmental change. To address the needs of the people affected and to inform policymaking, a better understanding of the scope, compositi
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Human Migration in the Face of Environmental Change: A Global Empirical Approach Els Bekaert, Ilse Ruyssen, and Sara Salomone
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Introduction
Climate change and migration take center stage in daily news reports and have shaped debates during many recent elections around the world. Climate change is affecting weather patterns, ecosystems and sea levels. As a consequence, an increasing number of people and countries on our planet is confronted with severe environmental problems. Broadly speaking, a distinction is made between fast or sudden onset hazards—in the literature also referred to as natural disasters—such as floods, storms or tropical cyclones; and slow or gradual onset hazards such as gradual changes in precipitation or (ocean) temperatures, desertification and sea level rise. Both types of environmental hazards directly impact people’s lives and increasingly threaten the livelihoods of entire communities. Changes in temperature and rainfall lead to droughts, heat waves, water scarcity and land degradation and have significant impacts on agricultural yields, as well as on fishing industries and food production more generally. Eventually this can result in rising famine, a greater frequency of infectious disease epidemics and substantial health effects, all of which are likely to cause decreasing labor productivity and
E. Bekaert (*) · S. Salomone Department of Economics, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium UNU-CRIS, Bruges, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] I. Ruyssen CESSMIR, Department of Economics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium United Nations University – Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), Bruges, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 G. Rayp et al. (eds.), Regional Integration and Migration Governance in the Global South, United Nations University Series on Regionalism 20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43942-2_3
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economic decay (IPCC 2014). Additionally, floods due to extreme rainfall or sea level rise and increased intensity and occurrence of storms might lead to major and recurrent destruction of lives, assets and livelihoods (Rigaud et al. 2018). Furthermore, global warming has large impacts on glaciers and ice sheets, which will keep declining and subsequently accelerate the rising of the sea level (Mousavi et al. 2011; Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). Especially for large coastal cities and low-lying rural areas the rising sea level is a major issue (Goldbach 2017). When severe environmental events are recurrent and people lack the means to diversify their assets and livelihoods, moving away from the deteriorating environment might be the only alternative (Rigaud et al. 2018). In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first put forward human migration as the greatest impact of environmental change. Today, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) clearly identifies environmental degradation, natural disasters and climate change as drivers of contemporary migra
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