There is a need for more precision, as well as more robust data, to strengthen research on the climate-conflict-migration nexus. To address pressing policy concerns, overarching generalizations are rarely helpful.
In a recent keynote at the Migration, Conflict, and Climate Change | WZB conference in Berlin, Research Professor Halvard Buhaug offered some reflections on key interactions in the climate-conflict-migration nexus.
The keynote highlighted how climate hazards can affect three dimensions of mobility, represented by common, simplified typologies: temporary vs permanent; internal vs international; voluntary vs forced movement, although these dimensions are better thought of as continuums. That is, they encompass important additional aspects: the time continuum includes permanency, speed, duration of movement, anticipatory vs reactive. A spatial continuum refers to internal vs international movement, distance, route, steps, (including immobility). A continuum of agency includes voluntariness, aspirations and capabilities, and prevailing policies.
There is great potential for further theorizing here as empirical research that covers all three phenomena (climate, conflict, migration) often is quite thin on theory, but all the more so, because there is often a lack of precision about how (and which) particular climate hazards (e.g., flood) might lead to a particular form of conflict (e.g., protest) through a particular form of mobility (e.g., internal displacement). Or, conversely, how a particular form of conflict (e.g., communal violence) might affect a particular form of mobility (e.g., seasonal migration), which in turn might produce vulnerability to particular climate hazards (e.g., drought).
The keynote draws on past research, including publications stressing the need for further harmonization of displacement data to facilitate better research; on how environmental vulnerability, violent conflict, and climate impacts (including on (im)mobility) may constitute a vicious cycle in fragile contexts; as well as a study debunking the myth that asylum seekers, including during the 2015 European migration crisis, might legitimately be described as 'opportunistic environmental migrants’ driven by adverse weather conditions in countries of origin.
