One of the biggest concerns surrounding climate change is its impact on people, with the World Bank estimating that 216 million people could be displaced by 2050. These concerns are concentrated in the poorer areas of the world, with Sub-Saharan Africa seeing 86 million climate migrants, East Asia and the Pacific 49 million, and South Asia 40 million.
“The Groundswell report is a stark reminder of the human toll of climate change, particularly on the world’s poorest—those who are contributing the least to its causes. It also clearly lays out a path for countries to address some of the key factors that are causing climate-driven migration,” said Juergen Voegele, Vice President of Sustainable Development, World Bank. “All these issues are fundamentally connected which is why our support to countries is positioned to deliver on climate and development objectives together while building a more sustainable, safe and resilient future.”
Forced to move
Research from Aalto University aims to truly understand the various social and environmental factors that may force people to move as a result of climate change.
The researchers utilize machine learning to try and provide a more nuanced perspective than the linear approach taken by traditional analyses of the topic that tend to focus purely on whether environmental issues result in migration or not. Such an approach tends to overlook social factors that inevitably play a role. To analyze things on a global scale has been traditionally difficult, however, which is where machine learning comes in.
“Perhaps the most surprising finding from our study is that, when we look at the overall picture, social factors are more important than environmental factors in explaining migration. And regardless of the level of income involved, gross national income was the key factor in explaining net-migration in half of countries,” the researchers say.
The researchers utilized random forest analysis to try and make sense of the relationships between various variables in the huge datasets they were analyzing. This included social factors, such as education, income, life expectancy, and government effectiveness, as well as environmental factors, such as food production scarcity, drought prevalence, water risk, and natural hazards.
Varied reasons
The analysis highlighted the variety of reasons influencing people’s decision to migrate. For instance, in Finland and Ethiopia, income was the key factor, whereas, in South Africa and America, education was the key.
On a global level, drought was found to be the biggest environmental factor. Nowhere was this more so than in Ethiopia, where drought and water risk were among the three main reasons for migration to occur.
“Very detailed data at the local, rather than national, level lets us see the areas from which people have moved, as well as the areas people have moved to—whether that’s across borders or within the country. For example, if a specific area has seen environmental stress, like a drought, we can zoom in to see whether there has been a loss of people due to out-migration over that same period,” the researchers say.
High vulnerability
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of migration occurred in the most vulnerable regions. Indeed, 58% of migration occurred in regions where environmental stress was high and the capacity to adapt to such changes was low.
“This is one of the biggest challenges of our times: the areas under environmental stress are the areas with lowest resilience, which means that they aren’t well equipped to cope with changes. As populations in Africa and South Asia are rapidly growing, decision-makers need to help build capacity to ensure vulnerable areas can deal with the consequences of a warming climate as well as other environmental stressors,” the authors explain.
The researchers plan to continue their work to better understand some of the reasons for the recent spite of global migration, so are creating a dataset to cover 2000-2020.
“For now what we can say is that with this recently published study we’ve been able to identify the basic factors involved in migration—next we’ll explore if and how the factors have changed in importance over time, as the climate heats up,” the researchers conclude.
