Migration and Slow-onset Events Desertification and sea-level rise Environment & Migration

Migration, droughts and desertification A relationship difficult to grasp

 Mix of different migration drivers  Droughts tend to aggravate other problems  Droughts as political events?  Effects on migration difficult to forecast  Very slow-onset  Migration can decrease at the peak of the drought  Environmental drivers are mixed with other socio-economic drivers

Two trends in the literature  Push factors  Aims to assess the weight of environmental drivers on migration  Tend to be neo-Malthusian and overly deterministic  Environmental changes do not affect all people the same way, and people does not respond the same way either.  Multi-level contextual drivers  Considers the complex interplay between different factors at the micro-level  Resort to traditional migration models, such as the New Economics of Migration  Migration as a risk-reduction strategy

The importance of socio-economic factors  Droughts are often the result of socio-economic conditions  Distributional issues  Seasonal migration determined by the seasons and the labour market  Temporary migration towards urban centres  Households that do not receive remittances are also those who are the most vulnerable to environmental degradation  And these vulnerable households are also those that are the least able to migrate.

Mobility as a coping strategy  Mobility is a coping strategy for people living in fragile environments  Reduction of dependance to environmental resources  Diversification of income  Migration as an adaptation failure or an adaptation strategy?  Migration related to slow-onset events tend to be little acknowledged, and hence litte understood and addressed.

Migration to fight desertification: The case of Inner Mongolia  Desertification  China losing 4,000 square kilometers per year  Dust and sand storms affecting Beijing, Japan and North Korea  Air pollution  Reforestation programmes not very successful  Overgrazing on grasslands  Chinese authorities accuse Mongolian pastoralists of being responsible for desertification problems.

Migration patterns  Important in-migration flows of Han Chinese  Mongol pastoralists moving to towns and cities  ‘Environmental Migration’ programme  Resettlement of pastoralists in villages  Double objective: environmental relief and poverty alleviation  Political objective as well?  Small compensations offered to migrants  Grasslands closed for 5-10 years  Programme aimed at relocating 650,000 pastoralists in the period

Sea-level rise Islands as laboratories

 Exotic islands have often been assimilated to intact, non- perverted spaces  Isolated from time and space  Fit to reproduce laboratory conditions  Providing simple models for the study of more complex societies (that is, Western societies)

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Islands as places of vulnerability  Used to be vulnerable to capitalism because of their lack of resources and weak economic potential.  Now vulnerable to climate change because of their small size and low elevation.  Also assimilated to places where men are vulnerable.

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But what does vulnerability mean?  Island populations are known for being remarkably resilient (Barnett 2001, Barnett & Connell 2010)  Vulnerability tends to be a Western discourse, unable to account for empirical realities (Bankoff 2001)  No agreement on what vulnerability means in international negotiations

Article 4.8 of UNFCCC acknowledges a particular vulnerability for:  Small-island countries  Countries with low-lying coastal areas  Countries with arid and semi-arid areas, or forested areas  Countries with areas prone to natural disasters  Countries with areas liable to drought and desertification  Countries with areas of high urban atmospheric pollution  Countries with areas with fragile ecosystems  Countries whose economies are highly dependent on fossile fuels  Land-locked and transit countries

Small island states as laboratories of climate change

 Islands are viewed as the incarnation of the impacts of climate change  Islanders as the first witnesses (and the first victims) of climate change  This representation has increasingly been used by SIDS governments make their voices heard in the negotiations Islands seem to matter only because they disappear

17 October 2009

In Copenhagen, they had forgotten to put the small islands on the giant globe that was in the middle of the conference hall.

Canaries in the coalmine  Canaries were used in coalmines to alert miners about the presence of toxic gases.  Likewise, ‘refugees’ from small islands are supposed to alert us about the dangers of climate change.  Deterministic perspective: migration presented as unavoidable.

Some well-intentioned reactions in Australia

Though well-intentioned, this rhetoric is deeply self- centred: « Look at them to see what’s going to happen to us » In the coalmine, canaries were never saved ‘Climate refugees’ are the living proof that climate change is happening

Empirical realities  Migrants from island countries move for a variety of reasons (Mortreux and Barnett 2008)  And they certainly do not consider themselves as disempowered victims (Gemenne 2011)  A deterministic perspective fails to capture the complex realities of migration process

Political responses and their misperception  In Maldives, the Safe Island policy  Migration agreements between Tuvalu and New Zealand

Safe Island Policy Hulhumale

Migration agreements between New Zealand and Tuvalu  Pacific Access Category  For 650 residents of Fiji, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tonga  Tuvalu has an annual quota of 75  Seasonal labour migration  Family reunification There are currently about 3,000 Tuvaluans living in New Zealand

Pitfalls of the canaries rhetoric Relativist trap (Connell 2003) – can become consubstantial of islanders’ identity Might disempower migrants and islanders Lessening their adaptive capacity Neglects the possibilities of local adaptation Current adaptation strategies might get discredited if the country appears doomed