Migration amid Climate Change: Adaptation, Displacement, and People Trapped in Place

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

 

[00:00:00.15] - Lawrence Huang

Hello everybody. I'm Lawrence Huang, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. We're very excited you can all join us today for today's webinar, Migration Amid Climate Change: Adaptation, Displacement, and People Trapped in Place. We're really excited for this conversation and the stellar group of speakers who are here to ground our discussion on how climate change and human mobility intersect on the ground in the field. We'll also hear from my brilliant colleague Julian Hattem about his new book, Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration. I'll introduce the speakers shortly, but before we dive in, we want to turn to MPI's President Andrew Selee for some opening comments. Over to you, Andrew.

[00:00:52.07] - Andrew Selee

Thank you, Lawrence, and it's great to be here. Julian, congratulations on the book, Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration. And I also should say that Lawrence Huang has been really leading some extraordinary work on climate and migration that I would call your attention to, everything from how financing intersects with this to what are the, you know, what is it we really need to be looking at? How is this intersecting? So a lot of regional work looking at how this looks different across different parts of the world. So look at our podcast, which, you know, Michelle Middlestadt has led with Lawrence, as well as Lawrence's work on this. And Julian, it is a great book. Let me say, I really enjoyed reading it. I had the privilege of reading it before it came out, actually. So not to brag, but it was really a great read. And one of the things about it is it just— I was on a plane. I thought I was going to read it for 15 minutes and just get a sense of the book. Ended up reading the whole thing because it just is really an engaging read.

And it gives you a really great introduction, a very balanced introduction to what we know about climate and migration, which is an emerging topic on which there's a lot of misinformation on one hand and a lack of information on the other. So it's clear the world is getting hotter. Climate change's impact on migration is going to grow more intense. The World Bank's Groundswell report has forecast that as many as 260 million people could be compelled to move internally because of climate change in 2050. And it's worth saying, and I know others will say this, that a lot of migration because of climate change is internal and not international. You know, both happen, but there is more internal migration. The reality on the ground, however, is much more complicated than what's suggested by these numbers or global media and government narratives, which often lean into polarizing rhetoric. Either there's no climate change or, oh my God, everyone's gonna move here. That's why this webinar is really focused on on-the-ground impacts. We're really happy to have Rose and Zahid with us today to talk about this as well, along with Julian. And we're going to tease out some of the messy causality.

Often we know climate is one of the factors that interacts with other factors in getting people to move. Sometimes it is the lead factor, but more often than not, it is actually a compounding factor with other things. So thank you very much, Julian. Congratulations on the book. Lawrence, congratulations on all the work you've been doing. Rose and Zahid, really, you guys have been leading on the ground on these efforts. Going to bring a world of practical experience and we look forward to the conversation. Lawrence back to you.

[00:03:23.17] - Lawrence Huang

Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So on today's webinar, we're going to take a step back from the politics and the policy of climate mobility and really think through the complex ways that climate change impacts migration and impacts migrants on the ground. We know some of the global statistics Andrew just shared them. We know that in 2024, we saw record levels of internal disaster displacement. We have really worrying projections about how climate change can reshape human mobility into the future. And most of my work tries to take this data and find new policy solutions out of it, new programs, and advising policymakers and international organizations, funders, on how to implement these types of policy solutions. But there are some times where I get to take a step back and really think through how these global statistics translate on the ground and how that's often far more complicated, happens in far more divergent ways than we expect. And that's why I was so excited when my colleague Julian Hattem started writing his new book, Shelter from the Storm, which I'm hoping you can see. Julian is the host of MPI's Changing Climate, Changing Migration podcast. He's the editor of MPI's Migration Information Source magazine, where many of you will have read the pieces that he edits in our climate Migration special issue.

His incredible new book offers a journalistic overview of the myriad ways that climate change is impacting migration. It draws on, on-the-ground reporting from multiple continents, some of which I know we'll hear about today, and it makes the case that climate change-related migration is not a future possibility but a current reality, and that migration is a natural and in some cases positive response to extreme climactic events, which will only become more important as the impacts of climate change worsen and become more pronounced. Personally, I felt like the book really transported me out of the sort of policy realm and helped me think through the concrete stories, the specific local communities that are impacted by these policies and the programs that I study. I also might be biased, but, you know, he's my colleague and my friend, but I think Julian's just written an excellent, easy read, both for those of us deeply steeped in the climate mobility field and, you know, for our friends and family and neighbors who know know nothing about the topic. So let me turn straight to Julian for some thoughts and introduction to his work. Julian.

[00:05:59.02] - Julian Hattem

Thanks so much. Thank you, Lawrence. Thank you, Andrew. That's an incredibly sweet and kind introduction, and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much to everyone for coming on. And, you know, more generally, thanks also to MPI for hosting this and supporting a lot of this work. You know, so the impacts of climate change are clearly growing both, you know, They're growing both more extreme, but also in a lot of ways are becoming more subtle, I think, including in migration. And I wrote this book to try and offer a general interest accessible overview of what exactly that process looks like, who is migrating, or in some cases being prevented from migrating, and how that migration ultimately affects our broader global societies, both on the receiving ends and on the origin ends where people are coming from and where they're going. I did some on-the-ground reporting, which is how I met Zahid, whom you'll hear from in a little bit, in Bangladesh. And I also stitched it together with some bigger picture issues and historicization. As you know, both Lawrence and Andrew mentioned, climate migration is a topic that MPI here has been focused on for a long time.

Lawrence has led a lot of great research, and I appreciate the plug. I will reiterate his plug for the podcast called Changing Climate, Changing Migration. You can find it on all the major podcast sources. Like us, subscribe, give us 5 stars. And on that podcast, you know, I speak with academics and practitioners and others. Because really I think climate change is one of the most vexing issues in migration of our day or era. As Andrew mentioned, and as Lawrence mentioned too, we know that climate change is already causing some number of people to leave their homes. Sometimes it's just for a few days or a week or two for a short-term evacuation to escape a fast-moving disaster like a wildfire or a hurricane, but you know, it can also be long-term and permanent. Especially if those fast-onset impacts come back year after year and grow more extreme, or if people are facing, you know, pronounced, dramatic, slow-onset changes like sea level rise or desertification, or as is often the case, if they're facing a combination of the two of them and it's difficult to keep up. In a lot of cases, it's difficult to disambiguate climate change from other drivers of migration, but not always.

And I think in, in some cases, it's actually relatively easy to pinpoint climate change as the primary factor of migration, especially I'm thinking about, you know, small, low-lying Pacific Island countries, for instance, places like Kiribati or Tuvalu. Their sea level rise is pretty clearly and unambiguously making places unlivable, or at least much less livable. I mean, there's no question that the ocean level is rising, and that is the result of global climate change, and basically global climate change alone, and that is threatening to subsume entire islands and force people to leave. But in a lot of cases, in a lot more cases, climate change isn't so much something profoundly new as it is one little extra element or kind of the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were. You know, there may be 50 other things that are going on and add in climate change and then migration starts to look like the most attractive option for someone. I want to talk about real people. So, you know, for instance, in the book, I did some reporting in Guatemala, particularly the so-called Dry Corridor, which is a semi-arid strip that runs down the middle of Central America.

It's, you know, particularly vulnerable to drought and rainfall variability, which is really hard on locals whose livelihoods depend on agriculture. But at the same time, you know, the region has also been hit by some intense hurricanes in recent years, and that can be kind of the one-two punch of this slow-onset degradation and the fast-onset disasters. In the Chiquimula region of Guatemala, I met a woman named Consuela for whom these issues were incredibly real, and she encapsulates a lot of the challenges we're talking about today. She was 40 years old. She has a small farm high up on the hillside where she grew beans and corn, but drought had made that farm a lot less profitable. Meanwhile, intense storms caused erosion and mudslides that caused literally some of her house to crumble out from underneath her. Partly in response to these issues, she had a son who left home and moved to the US. He went to New York, actually, where he had been living without authorization. He found some work, he sent back a couple hundred dollars every month, and that helped her stay afloat. Now, in a lot of ways, this migration might have happened regardless.

Her son might have gone either way, even if climate change had never happened. There is a long history of migration from Guatemala to the US, and, you know, For a lot of reasons, farming in rural areas has become less profitable way to live. But it's also clear that climate change impacts are part of this equation now in a way that they were not 40 or 50 years ago. And migration in this instance works in a couple of different ways. You know, on the one hand, farming in a place like the Dry Corridor has become more difficult and there are more obstacles that come from climate change, which has made other ways of earning a living increasingly attractive. That can be to the US or it can be to a bigger city. You know, just rural life is harder. But also the extreme storms and drought have a kind of a real tangible monetary cost to someone like Consuela. And when her son leaves to come to the US, he sends back money. And a lot of that money goes straight into helping her rebuild her house and solidify her home, her home and her farm.

So in a kind of paradoxical way, her son leaving home is a way to help her stay in place, even amid all the increasingly challenging environmental conditions that she was facing. And this is not that uncommon of a situation. You know, researchers often refer to this process as migration as adaptation, which is in contrast to the sometimes more prevalent or more sensationalist notion that leaving home is a sign of a failure to adapt or a kind of surrender to climate change. Actually, in the right circumstances, migration can be a success story. I want to note that, you know, her son migrated without authorization, which carries a range of problems on its own. I met her a couple of years ago, and frankly, I don't know the son's current status. I mentioned this case because I think it's informative and illustrative. But as Andrew said, you know, most migration in response to climate change is probably internal within a country rather than international. There is some sensationalist polarizing narrative sometimes that climate change is causing a huge amount of irregular or unauthorized migration, especially to the US and Europe. That's probably not the case. But in places like Guatemala, where there is a long history and culture of international migration, new climate pressures can add to that ongoing movement.

You know, according to some research, Central Americans from places with particularly dry weather were 70% more likely to migrate to the US than others. Some of my colleagues here at MPI have done research showing that Central Americans who face food insecurity, which is often a repercussion of environmental problems, they were more than 3 times as likely to be making concrete plans to move than those who were food secure. And so there is a connection here. But this webinar is called Adaptation, Displacement, and People Trapped in Place. And I wanted to very briefly acknowledge that last element too, people trapped in place. We all tend to focus on the people who do move and not the ones who don't, but When we do that, we're kind of only looking at half the picture. When terrible things happen, it's generally speaking good to be able to leave. You know, if there is a hurricane or a wildfire or some other serious event, it is good to get out of the way, at least for the short term. That's true in the US, it's true in Guatemala, it's true all over the world, right?

And it's not just about climate change. If some— you know, if there's a war going on, it's probably safer to leave home than to stay in the midst of the war. And so a lot of the people who are forced to stay in place even as the conditions around them deteriorate are really trapped. And a common line among researchers is that these are some of the most intense victims of climate change because they cannot get out even as the situation deteriorates around them. And as we talk about this issue, as you think about this issue, I want to just keep them in mind as well. That's about my time, so I'll leave things there and hand it back to Lawrence. I'm looking forward to my co-speakers and the Q&A section. Thanks so much again.

[00:14:17.23] - Lawrence Huang

Thanks, Julian, and a very useful reminder there. I read about the interviews in Guatemala in the book, but it's super helpful to hear about it today. Let me turn straight to another region and to our next speaker, Rose Kobusinge. Rose is the founder of Vital Crest Foundation, a woman-led nonprofit driving locally rooted solutions to climate and environmental challenges. Rose is an activist and advocate and a researcher committed to climate justice, sustainable development, and human mobility. She was also appointed as the African Union and International Organization for Migration Changemaker, and she holds a master's degree in environmental change and management from the University of Oxford and a bachelor's from Makerere University. So Rose, we wanted to talk to you a little bit about East Africa and how do climate change, development, and migration intersect in that region? And what does climate justice look like in the region?

[00:15:20.06] - Rose Kobusinge

Thanks, Lawrence. And I think speaking after Julian is quite hard because, you know, he has all these cool journalistic examples. But what I found relating with him is the fact that in different regions, even in Eastern Horn of Africa, we're kind of facing similar challenges with the other regions. Just that even though the context matters, the economic and sociopolitical contexts are different. But in the Eastern— in fact, before I talk about the Eastern Horn of Africa, right now as we speak, in the southern parts of Africa, Mozambique and South Africa, they are going through a very hard time with floods affecting 1 million, over 1 million people as we speak right now, uh, to a point of, you know, national parks being flooded and wild animals— there's a high risk of wild animals attacking people. The high alerts on crocodiles, the elephants have drowned. And that is the other aspect that is going on, even if I, I don't have the authority because I'm not in the region to speak about, um, why it's exactly happening on the ground, but Hundreds of thousands of households, houses have been flattened and people don't have where to start from.

People have lost lives. And those are the kind of losses and damages that do not reflect into the GDPs, do not reflect into the numbers that we present. The health and the mental and physical health of people after displacement and losing loved ones and property, those are some of the things that are very hard to account for. So coming back to the Eastern Horn of Africa and specifically, I'm Ugandan, so I'm from Uganda. And at the moment right now, we still have internet lockdown post-election, so that's going on. But in the news of, I mean, regarding climate and migration, Uganda has a very interesting geography and climates. You know, we have the eastern, western part of the country, we sometimes receive too much rain, but then you have in the north and northeastern where there's a bit more of semi-arid climate, and we have the hills and the mountains So it's very, very diverse, which also comes in with quite a lot of differences and challenges when it comes to the climate. So for instance, from the region where I come from and in my community, we're facing massive floods and massive displacements. In the eastern part of the country, in Mbale, in the mountainous area, it's lots of landslides.

But then in the northwest, in Karamoja region, we have— I mean, in the northeast, in the Karamoja region, we have lots of droughts. and even people starving to death because of, uh, no limited food. So I started working on this topic, I think, since 2021. Yes, I think around that. And, uh, because we had massive floods in my region and people were displaced, and I remember going to my first COP in Glasgow and wondering, like, how are you ever talking about climate when you're not talking about displacement and migration, when this is what I'm facing in my community? And then I started immediately doing a lot of campaigns with IOM and the African Union and everyone. And we've seen some shift, but still the people that inspired me to become a big advocate, they were displaced in 2020 and up to now they have never found homes. They're still living in IDP camps. And if you know Uganda, we're very proud of being one of the best countries with the best refugee policies in the world. And I'm always proud of that. But when it came and when it comes to people that are displaced by climate change, I don't even know what to say because first of all, there's no international interest in the topic.

The international interest that is there sometimes stops on publishing papers, but this is not what exactly people that are displaced need. So And my role, having stepped into research but also activism, is kind of like trying to bridge that gap. Right now, the people I'm working with in my small little NGO and with other youth NGOs in the region is we have these 1,500 people, displaced people in the camps. A lot of them are women. Some of them are children that have been abandoned because either their parents died or their parents have to move and go to the city, the town, to work. And these are like the human faces of climate and mobility. And we are working with these people directly with them, kind of like them coming up with the solution they want. For example, they were farmers, they lost all the land, they lost everything. Like, can you help us to have access to land? Because they don't have land. So we find land and hire land and then have a trainer with them on how to do climate smart farming. And out of that, even just within 2 seasons, they had tripled their income and they're able to hire land for themselves.

But also there was a lot of malnutrition and nutrition issues and food insecurity in the camp. So they're able to feed their families. So these are solutions that are led by them. And we are struggling, them as the IDPs, but also us who are hosts, but also live in the communities and work with them, is now we have the the funds that have been cut. And the government of Uganda, for instance, is struggling. First of all, they couldn't resettle them. Now it's going to 7 years. And, uh, but now the issue has been there's no interest to actually help these people, to resettle them, because what they're— they're not asking that take us to Europe or to the US. They don't even think about that. The first thing they want is a home, their right to stay in a safe environment where they can do their livelihoods as they used to do. But then there's also an aspect of, if we know they're Actually, a lot of them are still living in high-risk areas where we know they are going to be displaced in the next day or so. Why do we leave people there when there's an option of actually resettling in a safer area?

That's something that we keep looking at migration as failure instead of looking at it as an adaptation strategy, as a strategy to reduce loss, as a strategy to protect people. And then I come in with the human rights angle. Maybe as advocates and researchers on migration and climate, We fail to articulate the intersection with human rights. Maybe that could help our case in a way to get more resources, to get more support from human rights groups and all those ones. And then I also bring in the aspects of how we can actually mobilize resources to invest in adaptation and minimize loss and damage through directly working with migrants, but also the diaspora. As right now we are talking about, you know, finance cuts specifically from the US. We see the US withdrawing from almost every critical multilateral body and platforms and everything. So it's time we look into how do we support the diaspora and the migrants to invest back in strategic areas, entrepreneurships and livelihoods in communities that are highly vulnerable. So I'll first stop here and maybe come back because I see my time is running out.

[00:22:28.17] - Lawrence Huang

Thank you. Thank you, Rose. I think a really helpful reminder of how much climate change is sort of already baked into human mobility in Uganda. And that's something that we've seen in a couple of research projects in the region that, you know, floods and droughts and landslides, like you mentioned, they're already causing internal displacement. They're reshaping pastoralism. All of the mobility decisions across the region are already being affected by climate change. And I appreciate you raising that. Let's move to to another region where I, I'm, I'm pretty sure we see similar challenges. We'll go next to Zahid Shashoto, who is the head of program at Uttaran, a grassroots NGO in Bangladesh. He works on disaster risk management, water governance, and climate change adaptation focused on marginalized communities across coastal Bangladesh that are struggling to adapt to climate and economic shocks. He holds a BSc in Environmental Management from North South University and an MSc in Environmental Change and Management from Oxford, where he researched post-disaster coping strategies and how humanitarian organizations can shape those strategies. He's also a member of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund's governing board. Zahid, can you tell us about how climate and environmental change are affecting the communities where you work in Bangladesh?

[00:23:53.24] - Zahid Amin Shashoto

Thank you so much, Lawrence. I think my speakers before me set like very good examples. Well, I don't have examples all across the world, but my colleague Julian did, did say his experiences. I'm going to talk particularly about southwest Bangladesh, and I'm not going to blame only climate change. I will also In my experience, where I'm from, 20% of the population are landless people. And they became landless even though they are farmers and that's the only thing they know because of our colonial past where our British rulers decided that land should be a commodity and it can be sold. And so the poor farmers' land were taken over by rich elites. And so, and so these farmers who only now are also known as modern-day peasants, they work as a day laborer. And so, so you have the colonial past. There is also amazing stories that how— not amazing, but very terrible stories— how colonial rulers decided to shift river courses because it was too difficult with the river current to navigate from Bangladesh to West Bengal, India. So they decided to dump tons of sediments loaded boats in a roundabout of rivers, let's say.

So that disconnected my community from the upstream flow. And this community is now only based on, survives on tidal rivers. So no upstream flow, only saline water coming in. And so you have that colonial past. And in the '60s, because of the global Green Revolution, we decided to close off our rivers from our floodplains. And that was the final blow of the mal-development, I would say, that happened in my community. And in the next 40 years, from 2000 and onwards, we started seeing the impacts of climate change. So you have the colonial past, you have the post-colonial maldevelopment, and you now have climate change. So these are three things. Now imagine you becoming— you are a farmer and you don't have any land. You just farm on people's land as day laborer. And because over the last 30 years, this land where you used to farm, even as a laborer, has shifted its soil condition. It's now more saline because over the last 10 years you have seen 3 or 4 big cyclones which breach the dikes and you have salinity inundation. And so you can't farm on that land. So the landowner who's absent, he doesn't belong from there, he leases it out to a shrimp farmer.

And so, and the shrimp farmer doesn't need that many of laborers. So he says, I don't need you, you can go on, have your own thing. And the farmers, the poor farmer, he doesn't know what else to do. And the only thing he did and he has to do, the work he has in that area is cutting paddies or planting or sowing paddies. So he moves out, moves out to a slum in a small municipality, which then acts as a launchpad for him to move to a bigger municipality, where he goes and breaks ship in the Chittagong port. Like large ships— Bangladesh is a big dumping ground for old ships— or he goes to Dhaka and pulls a rickshaw. But the point I'm trying to make is that this is an example. And this is— of course, there are 2, 3 different things. Of course, in Bangladesh, we always had some sort of seasonal migration. Most communities, most households in my community used to work 6 months in the Bay of Bengal in the Sundarbans, which is a mangrove forest, one of the largest mangrove forests, not one of the, the largest mangrove forests in the world, and also in the sea.

And so they would be there 6 months and they would come back and have enough for the next 6 months. And now they don't. The Sundarbans are closed off because of course there are conservation efforts It works as a good carbon sequestration zone. In the Bay of Bengal, you have a lot of bans, so you can only fish 4 months a year, and other times you are not allowed to fish. So of course, so the policies are designed in a way— of course, climate change needs to be addressed, and we need to, we need to make sure that we don't We don't emit more carbons, but the policies are done in a way that, that it impacts the poorest of the poor without in a way thinking how do we compensate them. So you are asking a fisher, someone who only knows how to fish in the sea, to say you can't fish more than 4 months. Someone who is to be a honey collector in the Sundarbans, you are saying you can only collect honey in this period of the time and, and not give him an alternate So they seek a different path.

So they found the easiest way for them to earn is in the brick field. And in Bangladesh and West Bengal, just nearby where I live is West Bengal, you have hundreds and hundreds of brick fields. And these have no license, and these have no— the severe design flaws with extreme level of pollution emitting from and no labor rights. So you sell your labor a bit early. So you take 3 months in advance saying, hey, I want to work for you, give me 3 months advance so I can give it to my family here and I work for you. And so even if halfway through you're like, shit, I don't want to work here, you're done. You can't, you can't escape. I'm sorry for my language, but that's the thing. You are trapped in that system. Even I have done I've done like a small research looking into the, the work life for a brick field worker. The work life, they can work, most of them works only till the age of 48. After that, they physically cannot. So they lose 12 years of their working life. They live, they probably live up to 65, but they can't work.

So either they have a broken leg, they had, they have back pains, or, and they said they have asthma, they have other things. And, and that's, that's how it goes. And, uh, not just— so this is, this is the, this is what the temporary or seasonal migration looks like. You used to be a forester, used to be a fisherman, you used to go around the country to cut paddies. Now you don't have those work and you have only bricklaying, uh, and that's one. And then you have the permanent migration, and of course permanent migration people would do for their own growth, but this is a forced permanent migration. A lot of people say the forced displacement, a lot of people has different definitions. You have displacement, migration, and forced migration, forced displacement, all of this academic jargon. But I see people who wanted to stay back in their home is pushed away, and that, that's the case. And they don't do it at once, like, oh, let's make a plan and before the cyclone we move permanently. They try 3 cyclones, 4 cyclones, 5 cyclones, and at the end they're like, nah, it's too much, it's too much.

And the whole structure of it is like this: if me having a salary, I can go and loan an EMI of a good cell phone, or even for a house or a car, these people who is constantly their houses are being washed away their prop assets being damaged. They can't get bank loans. The only loan they get is NGO-led microcredit loans, which has 17% of interest. So it's very different than what the privileged have in their structure and what the underprivileged or marginalized have in their structure. So yeah, so of course there are people working And there's this amazing thing, I don't know, Julian, whether you have looked into it. It's a— there is an Amartya Sen's capability approach that talks about it, uh, that talks about choices, that's talk about, uh, the, the capability that people has, whether they can or not. So a lot of the options people have or given, it's, it's very limited as an options, and whether With those options, you're providing the opportunity and the capability to decide. It's very— it's one of the surprising things. We have a fund called the Reverse— Reversing the Flow by the Dutch government, where we say to— we go to a community and say, here's $30,000, your community can do whatever you want, you can decide.

So I was surprised. So I went to one community where all of them are landless, lives on the dike, and I said I said, why don't you buy, use that money to buy land somewhere else and move out all of the 100 villages, 100 households? And they said, they paused and they didn't have an answer. They just never owned the land, owned a piece of land of their own. And they just didn't know that they can use the money to buy land. And I said, they said, but we need water right now. And it's like, I understand you need water, but you can use $30,000 to get good amount of land somewhere. And I said, okay, not land. You work as shrimp laborers. So women worked as shrimp laborers and men migrate and women also are paid less. So men are paid 300 Bangladeshi Taka, which is almost $2, and women are paid $1.50. But anyways, that's not the point. And I said, you work as shrimp laborers in the shrimp farms. You with the $30,000, you can literally lease out the whole shrimp farm, the whole shrimp farm in there, like hundreds of acres of land.

They just didn't know. That's the thing. That's the thing. That's why I'm mentioning Amartya Sen, that whether that, that there needs to be us making sure they realize that, that the capability, we need to understand their positionality. And where we come from, not just them but even me. So all of us have different situationality, positionality, where it gets really difficult, uh, to speak, to, to be loud, and to make people hear about ourselves. I might be all around the place, scattered, but to conclude, in Bangladesh there are seasonal migration, there are permanent migration, and it's happening because of climate change. But it's also happening because of structural past, our colonial past. And, uh, so when climate adaptation funds come, it should not only look into climate adaptation, it should also look into structural fixing and the whole system that comes along with it. So yeah, I just wanted to pause here and pass it on to Lawrence and other people who's here, and thank you everyone for joining. Over to Lawrence.

[00:35:46.17] - Lawrence Huang

Thank you. Thank you, Zahid. And it's very helpful to have the long history in the Bangladeshi context and, you know, the reminder that it's climate change that lies on top of, you know, governance failures and policy failures and hard policy tradeoffs like you described in water governance and infrastructure and the policies around where people can work and where they can fish and how all of that put together leads leads to people moving. Well, I want to thank Julian, Rose, and Zahid for this really important conversation. I'm struck by how many of the same challenges and the same themes appear, whether it's in Guatemala or in Bangladesh or in East Africa. You know, each of you talked about livelihoods, whether it's farmers or whether it's fishers. It's people moving internally and seasonally as IDPs in Uganda or seasonal work is in Bangladesh. It's sometimes adaptive, it's sometimes forced migration. And it's very often you all are describing that sort of gray zone where it's a bit in the middle of the two. And I also want to say I appreciate how much you all highlighted that people in your communities wanted to stay with their communities and with their families despite the governance and the climate challenges that they're facing.

[00:37:04.22] - Lawrence Huang

I have many thoughts, but I think it's probably better if we try to take as many questions as we can. We have some questions that have already come in, so we'll start with those, but please type any questions you have into the Q&A function. I will try bundle them and get through as many as possible in the time that we have. So we had a question come in that I will maybe pose to Rose and Zahid. Rose, you already started talking about it. How are the global aid cuts impacting people in your regions, if at all? And how is that related to climate mobility? Maybe I can turn to Rose briefly and then Zahid.

[[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

[00:37:42.03] - Speaker 4

Right. No, thanks, Lawrence, and thanks everyone. Zahid, for that, taking us through Bangladesh, I feel like I know a little bit now more than I knew a few minutes ago. And just something before going to that question, what is actually connecting to the question that you've asked. So in Uganda at the moment, kind of like relation to what Zahid talked about, we also have similar cycles or eras of migration. And but we also have an aspect of international migration as a result. And I think sometimes we either tend to forget it and focus on internal or forget internal and focus on, you know, cross-border. But I don't know if you are familiar with the route from East Africa or Africa in general to the Gulf States. The GCC, uh, in the Middle East. And that has become a very critical route and very interesting in terms of research, um, but also in terms of governance, because we have a lot of girls, uh, especially leaving from Uganda, from Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, mostly these countries closer, moving to Oman to Dubai to Saudi Arabia and the rest. And so that route has become very economically— how can I say it— economically critical and important because it sends back lots of money.

[00:39:15.10] - Speaker 4

And a lot of the young people that go there go as domestic workers because of course what happened, a combination of, you know, inequality, climate change making agriculture you know, impossible and failing livelihoods, but also the governance issues that at the same time, like Zahid was talking about. So a lot of young girls are moving to the Gulf states to find jobs, and a lot of them as domestic workers, a lot of trafficking going on. So that is happening there. And but now bringing in the cuts in aid, as I'd mentioned, Uganda is actually among the top 5 highest refugee hosting countries in the world. We are hosting over 1.6 million. I don't know if it has changed, but it only changes by increasing rather than by reducing because of the conflicts in, you know, in Sudan, in South Sudan, in Congo, in DR Congo. And we have opened, the country has opened, and us as citizens have opened our world to our neighbors, to even the further neighbors in Somalia and Eritrea open to come to Uganda. It's a country that is open almost to everyone if they need of a home as refugees.

[00:40:29.13] - Speaker 4

But then we see this, you know, funding cuts that are happening. So the country is at that age of like, okay, we opened the world, we thought we'd get some little support that we can, but it's also being cut off. And the refugee context is very complex because these are already displaced people from conflicts, and they come and settle in areas that are also vulnerable to droughts and floods. So the complexity and the additionality of the challenges that they face, I can't even say doubled, by many threefolds. I can't say doubled, but they just increased by so many folds. And how are we adapting to that? I think, um, we're still figuring out, trying to figure out things. Um, the, the taxes are increasing every single day. They're trying to tax almost everything, but most of those tax really affect the, you know, the poorest. And so it increases inequality, a lot of inequality in a way. And I always I always say in my advocacy that if we know who caused climate change, then we know who is responsible for the people that are losing homes and losing livelihoods and being forced to move.

[00:41:51.19] - Speaker 4

So the same people who cause climate change that we know should be responsible for these challenges. They should pay for these challenges, the loss and damage for the women that are struggling, for the women that are losing their livelihoods, their identities, and who they are. In the struggle of trying to solve multiple challenges. There's poverty. There is inequality. Now there's climate change. There is— so especially from the youth and women perspectives, a lot of youth organizations are struggling at the moment trying to do crowdfunding. And there's a shift that is happening, especially in the youth-led organizations, of trying— can we try into entrepreneurship and see if we can generate money to be able to invest back into doing work at the community level. So I don't know if, Zahid, you have better things happening as a result. But either way, it's either adapt or perish.

[00:42:48.05] - Speaker 1

Indeed. Zahid, do you mind if I actually divert the conversation a little bit? Because we have many, many questions. And I'm realizing we will not get through them if I ask multiple people to respond to them. I want to turn to Julian and then to Zahid because there's a couple of questions for you. Julian, I would love your thoughts to two questions. There's a question that came in around how do you balance work to support people adapt in place versus work to support people to move? And then also a question around how is it possible to differentiate climate change as a cause for migration from other factors? And I would say also, when is it helpful for us to be trying to do that work to disaggregate? Climate change and other drivers. So balancing adaptation versus mobility and differentiating drivers.

[00:43:38.21] - Speaker 3

Yeah, great questions and I'm going to try and address them. I also very briefly wanted to add two sentences to Rose's comments about climate impacts on people who are already themselves forcibly displaced in refugee settlements. Uganda, as she notes, has a large number of refugee settlements as Bangladesh. I think the largest refugee settlement in the world is in southeastern Bangladesh. And these camps, refugee camps, are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. So it is not just the case that people are being forced out of their homes by climate impacts, but people already on the move are some of the most vulnerable. Three-quarters of the world's forcibly displaced people live in countries that are heavily impacted by climate change. And in the next couple decades, there's a projection that most refugee settlements will see twice as many days of dangerous heat as they did as they do now. And so I think refugees who are in some ways doubly impacted by both being displaced and then kind of suffering climate impacts. To your question, adaptation versus supporting migration. I mean, I think there is a real balance. So there is a genre of policy moves called managed retreat or forced relocation, or the planned relocation, which are essentially to uh, on a community-wide or sometimes national or like larger level to decide that a certain area is for whatever reason no longer habitable and we should plan to move away from there collectively together as much as we can.

[00:45:09.17] - Speaker 3

Um, there's been several, relatively small scale, but there's been a long history of this happening, uh, including in some Native American communities here in the US, but also in other towns in the US and internationally. And that is, I mean, I think that's a trend that I think gets at the notion that like when people want to move, they want to move safely and legally and clearly and like, and they want to do so willfully or voluntarily. And so this is a real problem, especially for places like the low-lying Pacific Islands that I mentioned at the beginning, for whom like there is kind of this real need to potentially go somewhere without intense adaptation. There are, you know, you can build a seawall around places like Tuvalu or Kiribati in theory, but that is incredibly expensive. And I mean, realistically, it is prohibitively probably expensive. And the only alternative is in some cases to move. And so I think people want to stay at home, as that's been a common theme of this discussion. People love their homes. People are attached to their homes. People want to stay in their homes. When staying in their homes is not possible, the people want to move.

[00:46:20.13] - Speaker 3

Safely, legally, and by choice, and, you know, by choices that they make and not by choices imposed upon them, either because of a disaster or by force. And so, yeah, there is, there is a tricky balancing act. There is no kind of, you know, magic solution of like, in this case, you want to help people stay in place, in this case, you want to help people leave. It is context dependent and it's very difficult. And I think it is a problem that you, Lawrence, or any other kind of people focused on policy are going to be reckoning with for a very long time. On the question of disambiguation and trying to distinguish like when, who is a quote unquote climate migrant and who is not. It's tricky. I mean, there is a value in knowing whether climate change is a factor, even if it is complex and subtle and nuanced. There is a value in knowing that climate change is an element here. And partly that is so that you can design responses to prevent forced displacement or help people move legally and safely. I mean, you can't fix a problem unless you know what the problem is.

[00:47:27.07] - Speaker 3

So I think that is one. I think that underscores the importance of extricating the different drivers. And there is also the— this is a whole kettle of fish that I don't necessarily want to go into, but there is for international movement the question about causality. Like when you're moving across the border, why you're moving legally matters. And I don't want to go too much into this, but like it is the case that, you know, there are no legal refuge, there are no legal, basically legal migration pathways for people displaced by climate change. And so I think that knowing why someone moving is relevant in that discussion as well. I don't know, Zahid, if you want to add anything.

[00:48:11.07] - Speaker 1

Thanks, Julian. No, Zahid, I have a separate question for you, and then we're going to try and squeeze in another round. Someone asked specifically about the Reversing the Flow project, but I have a broader question, which is, in the work that you do, when there is funding available to implement projects on adaptation, governance, mobility, how do we ethical, well-thought-out, conscientious, and non-paternalistic ways, is the way the question is phrased. How do we expand the community's ability to imagine spending funds beyond their immediate needs and to think through the whole sort of set of options they have to use their funds to better their lives? How do you engage those communities in that way?

[00:49:00.21] - Speaker 5

No, just maybe quick example. When I studied in the UK, one of the reasons, of course, it's a funny thing. One of the reasons I say I came back is because I hated the food, you know. So for, for all my life I have been eating nice food and then suddenly I don't get it. But the point I'm trying to make is that these communities also had their own thing going on and so own practices. And it's, it's, it's someone who never owned land would find it very difficult that with the money, though, you know, in someone who's a scientist or who studied, let's say, through mathematical terms, they said, okay, land would give that person a better chance for moving away from climate change impacts and to resilience. But that's the case. Like, so what, to refer to the question, is that is, uh, it takes time. And that's what the big financiers doesn't have. They, they— one of the most important thing is that, uh, that it takes, it takes trust, it takes a slow understanding, it takes planning together, it takes, um, it takes, uh, it, it takes enough, uh, it takes mistakes as So, and none of the funders wouldn't allow you and say, oh, you have made a mistake. And so, and so, okay, try, go on and try again. So no one would say that. Everyone would say your task was to deliver resilience. You haven't delivered in 2 years. So, and that's what I'm saying in the Reversing the Flow program. We actually have that opportunity and it's a program not happening in Bangladesh, but in 5, 6 other countries, mostly in Africa and one in Bangladesh. So it's a 5-year program. Of course, we together is trying to make it 10 years so that it's a journey. So we, we, we, we, we. So in the program, the money is handed over to communities and they, they, they can make mistakes and they and the funders say, okay, that's a, that's okay, that's a process. And it's something like that. We We have done, as, as people say, we have done their development on behalf of them.

[00:51:18.24] - Speaker 5

So, and so the resilience of doing it again, or the process of doing it again, is only stored with us. They could have done it way better if we never intervened, but because we have intervened, we have in a way snatched the opportunity for them to do it by themselves. I have this perfect example in Bangladesh Before 1960s, water governance was done by local communities in Bangladesh. They used to make this thing called dosher baad, which is together everyone's embankment, where they would make embankment for 8 months a year and open it for 4 months during monsoon so the tidal river can flood the floodplain and bring in sediments. Then the government decide to establish a water board that the government would manage in Dhaka, in the central capital. And then they made these dikes and they decided their water board officers would go and monitor them. And then people said, okay, it's a government doing that, and so I don't need it, it's a central power doing it. So people stopped intervening, and for the past 60 years they, they forgot how to do it. So what I'm— so in, in short, it takes time More than money, it takes time. So that's it. Over to you, Lawrence.

[00:52:36.22] - Speaker 1

Yeah, the moving beyond the donor cycle is something that we've, we've looked at quite a bit and it's very difficult for both donors and for communities and implementing partners. There are many questions. I'm going to say there are a set of questions around different data sources and modeling and also a couple of questions around philanthropy. For people who are interested in that, feel free to reach out to me. We're doing some research on these issues. But I wanna ask a separate set of questions here while I have these three. So Julian, very briefly, we have a question around what are some creative ways in which we can communicate the climate and migration nexus with wider audiences beyond academia in an accessible way? How can we get creative there?

[00:53:20.08] - Speaker 3

You can shamelessly self-promotion. You can buy Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration. And no, I mean, I think So like, my background is as a journalist. And I think that like, one of the things that journalism teaches you is that like stories matter and people matter, right? And if you can put like an individual human face on a thing, like that's better than a statistic. And I think that like, faces come in many ways. I mean, you know, videos or podcasts, whatever, right? But I think if you can tell human individual stories, I think that is helpful. And I think it like kind of transcends the academic barrier there. But I also, I kind of want to make clear, like, people don't tend to think of themselves as like climate migrants. There was, Lauren said to be quick, I'm going to be super quick. There was an episode in southwestern Bangladesh where I was talking to a guy who had been displaced a couple of times by cyclones and mudslides and riverbank erosion. And I asked him at one point, like, do you consider yourself a climate refugee?

[00:54:20.17] - Speaker 3

Which is what kind of we had, my translator and I had been referring to him as. And like, you know, it did not translate, right? Like that concept does not go through. It's just like, he's a guy who wants to get some land, who has kids and wants to support his kids and wants to give his son some land. And so I think like that is also meaningful too, that like, if you have a taxonomy of people, climate refugee, climate migrant, whatever, like people don't, the individuals themselves might not use that framing. And so I think being cognizant of that, is helpful in reconciling it and distributing and telling those stories.

[00:54:57.00] - Speaker 1

Thanks, Julian. And this is why we appreciate someone with a journalism background working on these issues. Rose, so we have a question around— we have a couple questions around how can the initiatives aiming to support people affected by climate change better incorporate migration issues? And I'd say migrants themselves into adaptation approaches, projects, planning? How do we include migration and migrants?

[00:55:22.12] - Speaker 4

Thanks, Lawrence. I can say I have like so many questions, so we probably have to arrange something another time so we can come and go deeply into these things. But I think I'll start by how you ask the questions, starting with the people themselves. And I think going back to what Zahid talked about, you know, the colonial past is like What our countries did when they got independence, they didn't fight to get independence to replace the system. They fought to replace the people and continue with the same extractive systems to their own people. So what do we need to do is break it down. And even though I say that, I'm not saying that we're gonna see a magic bullet that is going to break the whole system, but within our own capacities Do you have a research organization? Do you have an NGO? How about this time not going— or you have a— you're a funder or a philanthropist. How about instead of going straight giving all the money to the big guys where it's going to get lost within the bureaucracy, how about find a way of working with them but starting from the local, starting from the women groups, the youth groups, the local governments that work directly with the people?

[00:56:29.10] - Speaker 4

And, you know, in different ways, instead of asking for proposals that ask for 10 years of reporting? How about creating funds that are accessible to young people, to the informal groups that work directly to address these issues? And of course, policy is very important. I'm a big advocate of the Kampala Declaration on Migration, Environment and Climate Change, which is the first of the kind that is moving to the continental level, to the African Union level, recognizing climate and migration at the regional level and trying to see how countries can implement their own national adaptation— I mean, national plans of actions to address climate and migration, but also harness migration for adaptation, including diaspora, but also the participation of migrants and refugees.

[00:57:15.22] - Speaker 1

Thank you. Thank you, Rose. I am always inspired when I get to hear about your work and Zahid and others. We are at time. I'm going to— yes, I'm going to take moderator's privilege and take Yes, I am. And I'll squeeze in one more question, either for any of you, which is there was a question around the role of cities and local communities in responding to influence of climate mobility, especially secondary cities, meaning the smaller cities. Anybody want to respond to anything that you've seen in terms of your work at the local level? How are cities better placed to respond to climate and migration issues?

[00:58:04.10] - Speaker 4

I have a lot I could say, but maybe Zahid.

[00:58:07.20] - Speaker 1

Zahid, do you want to answer? Rose, go ahead briefly.

[00:58:13.02] - Speaker 4

Yeah, I think I come from— so where I come from has now transformed, has grown into a secondary city. So it's a tourism city in Uganda, in Fort Portal. And I've actually personally reached out to to the city council about this same situation because Fort Portal is located in the middle of so many other— I saw someone talk about in Ntoroko, there's Bundibugyo, Kasese. So it's in the middle of areas that are very vulnerable to floods and people are moving in definitely. And the challenge is that for the secondary city, at least for the bigger cities, they have mayor councils, they have like international recognition. You know how the mayor's climate council is doing, and that's amazing. They still have a lot of work to do in terms of urban planning. And let's face it, a lot of the climate issues that happen in the cities are not necessarily climate, they are planning issues. They are to do with, you know, how the cities are planned, and then the waste, the plastic waste in the cities. And then when something happens, it's very easy to blame climate change and scapegoat climate change. So I've reached out to a city about this similar question And the challenges for the smaller cities, as I mentioned, they don't have like structures, they don't have access to bigger platforms, and they are aspiring to do the same as the bigger cities are.

[00:59:31.10] - Speaker 4

So my small city, Fort Portal, is aspiring to be Kampala instead of trying to be better. So there's a lot of work to do in advocating, but also we need to move resources to these smaller cities so they can plan better. And engage better in terms of, you know, green spaces, adaptation, better planning and all that.

[00:59:52.06] - Speaker 1

Thank you, Rose. I just wanted to make sure that we talked about that really important issue. Thank you, everybody who joined us. I apologize. There are many questions that we couldn't get through. We got to as much as we could with the time we have. An audio and video recording of this webinar will be available on the event website later. Thank you to Lisa Dixon at MPI for managing this webinar and all of that. You can find our climate-related work on our website at the link on the slide and in the chat. Check out Julian's new book, Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change is Creating a New Era of Migration. Reporters on the call can contact Michelle Middlestadt with any questions. We are very grateful to Julian, Zahid, and Rose for taking the time today and to everybody for joining this webinar. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day.