Despite the temporary reprieve caused by the COVID-related slow down in human activity throughout 2020, climate change continues to warm the planet, thus prompting many of the most inhabited regions on Earth to become unviable.  This creates a very real choice for inhabitants of those regions – to stay, or to go.

Alas, as new research from Princeton highlights, the world is not particularly set up to cope with large movements of people and the restrictive border policies in place around the world are likely to exacerbate the vulnerability caused by climate change.

What’s more, as I’ve covered numerous times, migration helps both migrants and the two countries involved, so such restrictions have both financial and human costs.

Safe ground

The researchers developed a model, the kind of which is often used by policymakers to understand the social cost of climate change, but their model made sure that migration was factored in.

“In discussions about international migration and global climate policy, it seemed that many were looking through the lens of the people coming in, focusing only on the destination country, and not what it would mean for both the migrant population and origin countries,” the researchers explain. “Our work shows these conversations need to be brought closer together.”

The researchers wanted to discover both the impact of climate change on people around the world and how easy it would be to deal with the impacts of climate change, including being able to move to safer places.

They tested these questions via the Integrated Assessment Model, which is a commonly used climate economy model.  While commonly used, it has a fairly simplified view of migration, so the researchers improved it to better account for the dynamics of both migration and remittance.

Preparing for change

Remittances are important as the money can help people to prepare for the changes brought about by global warming.  The model was tested via examination of different border policies, with the researchers making some easier than they are today, and some harder.  They also measured the impact these border policies might have on both people’s income levels and their ability to relocate.

The researchers then compared this with actual migration flows via data from the World Bank to project out until 2100.  Using a gravity model, they aimed to take account of demography, economics, migration, and income differentials between places to predict the migration patterns.

The analysis found that both the exposure and vulnerability to climate change was greatest in developing countries, and people from those areas would often move to safer areas throughout much of the 21st century.

Such free movement not only benefits the individuals, but also the countries themselves.  The researchers highlight how when people move freely, they often send more money to their homeland, which has proved to be a vital source of income for many countries, and can even be used to reduce the risk of climate change.

Of course, such logic seldom finds a place in debates around immigration, certainly at the moment when the topic is highly emotive.  It nonetheless provides more evidence for when we return to more rational times.

“Our motivation in projecting climate-related migration is to provide a basis for public policy that will improve outcomes for migrants and for people at migration destinations as well as the communities they left behind,” the researchers conclude.