The Benefits of Climate Migration

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CHAPTERS 

[00:00:40]: Can climate-related migration support resilience outcomes? 

[00:03:48]: How migration can expand access to resources and income 

[00:04:02]: Remittances and development: comparing flows to foreign aid 

[00:07:09]: Evidence from Thailand: agriculture, skills, and local adaptation 

[00:10:41]: When migration leads to positive outcomes—and when it does not 

[00:16:52]: Translocal systems: how households remain connected across locations 

[00:26:20]: COVID-19 disruptions: impacts on mobility, remittances, and networks 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:03.19] 

Hello and welcome to another episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration from the Migration Policy Institute. This is the podcast all about how different aspects of climate change are influencing migration. I'm your host Julian Hattem and I'm also the editor of MPI's in house magazine, the Migration Information Source. We're producing this podcast in tandem with a series of articles on climate change and migration. Those are online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Often when we talk about migration in the midst of climate change, we talk about this migration as a negative thing. Typically it's framed as an unfortunate consequence of climate change, or in some cases as the last resort for communities that have exhausted all other methods of adapting in place. But that can be a bit short sighted of a perspective. Just like other types of movements. This phenomenon that we have been calling climate migration is neither inherently bad nor good. Instead, it can be better to think of it as a strategy that people might take in response to various pressures which can lead to a wide array of outcomes. And today I want to talk about some of the ways that migration can be beneficial for individuals and communities threatened by the impacts of climate change.

[00:01:24.16] 

And I am very glad to be able to do so with Harald Sterly. Harald is a human geographer at the University of Vienna in Austria and he co-wrote an article for the Migration Information Source looking at how people in Northeast Thailand have used migration as a tactic to be more resilient to environmental changes. Harald, thank you so much for coming on.

[00:01:44.18] 

Thanks Julian. I'm very happy to be here with you.

[00:01:47.20] 

So as I mentioned, there is a common narrative that people who are prompted to migrate because of climate or environmental circumstances are always tragic victims of devastating events beyond their control. And while we certainly don't want to discount the very real and difficult challenges that many people face, what's missing in that narrative? Why is migration in the face of climate change not always a bad thing?

[00:02:14.10] 

Yeah, that's a good question. I think one key thing that you already mentioned is the way how migration in the face of climate change with nexus with linkages to climate change is depicted. And very often this is framed in terms of displacement and involuntary migration of whole communities and dislocation of families and households, which is happening and it's tragic of course, and we have these cases for sure. But there's many other ways we see human mobility linked in one way or the other to climate change or to environmental change and environmental factors. And in many, many cases these linkages are indirect. And in many of those cases, as we have seen in Northern Thailand and northern Eastern Thailand, northeastern Thailand, as you mentioned, what we could see is that migration with all its linkages and the things that come after people go, right, they stay usually connected to their places of origin. They send money, they send ideas. All this leads to people increasing their capacity to deal with any kind of risks. One thing, one key reason why people migrate is to deal with difficulties and problematic situations, right? Need more income, need better life chances, and so on.

[00:03:38.23] 

And one type of these risks could be and are an increasing number of cases, climate risks. So what can happen or what we can observe is that migration unlocks resources for people to deal with adverse effects of climate change.

[00:03:55.20] 

You say unlocks resources.

[00:03:57.16] 

What do you mean by that?

[00:03:58.14] 

What kind of resources can migration unlock?

[00:04:01.18] 

Well, one very prominent example is always financial remittances. We might have this ratio of 4 to 1 between international remittances and the international development aid flowing. So it's a huge amount of capital that is transferred by migrants to their...

[00:04:24.18] 

four times as much money goes back to origin countries in terms of remittances compared to international aid?

[00:04:30.24] 

Yes, exactly. So, so it's a huge figure. And in the past years this has been. Even the ratio has been increasing slightly. So it's quite a significant amount of resources. And we have an unknown amount of finances even transferred within countries. So what happens on the international scale also happens at the domestic scale. Money transferred from the capital city of Bangkok, for example, or the people working in factories to the northeast where their families and household members live. So this financial remittances, and that's already something, right? So if your harvest fails in the rural areas, but you still can rely on regular, or even not only regular, but also the case of emergency remittances and money sent by your relatives, that helps you get by, that helps you cope with the adverse impacts of disasters. But then there's also ideas, worldviews, all kinds of, we could say social remittances coming with these migratory movements that are established through people going to another place. We have multiple examples also from Thailand, where especially ideas and knowledge, but also aspirations and let's say entrepreneurial spirit, to put it in that way, comes with return migrants, of course, people coming back after some years of work, bringing, bringing skills with them, but also directly through linkages that people have to other places.

[00:06:04.06] 

So there's all sorts of things coming and going. Not only money, but there's also goods. There's clothing, there's tools, there's the mobile phone. The mobile phone coming with people from the cities to the rural areas and so on. So there's lots of exchange relations, what we have here.

[00:06:23.01] 

Talk to me about some of those examples either from Thailand or others that you've seen in your work. I mean, what kinds of... You talk about entrepreneurial ideas or skills and things of that nature. I guess what are we referring to? Let's talk maybe if there are farmers, are they just learning different types of irrigation or what kinds of things do people learn or kind of how are their mindsets changed in ways by migration from that you've seen from your research?

[00:06:52.14] 

Well, that depends, of course, very much on the context. From our research in Thailand, we have a broad range of examples what people bring back or send back that transforms the way things are done. Just to give an example, we had one return migrant from the poor northeast of Thailand who worked as a journalist in Bangkok. And through her networks and her topics on, I think, agroecological change and organic farming. She had ideas of doing something with organic farming when returning to the village. And when she had returned to the village, she started doing organic rice business and soon found out that there was a lack of producers because to cater for local markets, it was too difficult for her to negotiate prices and to make convincing offers to, for example, hospitals needed a reliable, pesticide free source of source of food. So she initiated other people to turn to organic farming as well. So there's this one person who transformed, who really transformed half a village to organic farming. And they are now catering all the hospitals and some of the schools in the sub district with organic rice. Then there are very small examples where people see other agricultural practices.

[00:08:16.02] 

For example, not transplanting the rice, which gives you a higher yield, but it's very time consuming. And once you have higher climate variability and the rain comes, you start transplanting your rice and then the rain goes away again for two weeks. Your eyes is dead. You have to do the whole thing again. That's not affordable for farmers. So people start directly sowing the rice like we would sow our cranes, like putting the grains of the fields, which has a low yield, but it's much less work. And it's an adaptation to changing climate regimes or rainfall regimes. And this, we could trace this back to migrants, domestic migrants staying at somewhere saying, I observed that happening, I was wondering and I told my people at home, and now they do that. Well, they save lots of money because they don't need to pay day laborers to do the rice transplanting. Right, that's, that's an example. Another example, migrants going to Israel, working in, in highly technologized agriculture coming back and starting drip irrigation on fields in Thailand. So there's all these kinds of examples. One problem is if people work in. We have these examples in industrial or in construction activities.

[00:09:31.17] 

For example, in Singapore or Bangkok. The more complex tasks are broken down to single things. Like if you are only doing concrete slabs for elevators. That's the thing. You can't do concrete work in your village. But the most specialized things that you really learn, that you got well paid in your destination in Taiwan or Singapore. You cannot transform this easy to a village or translate this into something that pays off in the village. So there's hindrances to getting everything from, from one place to the other in terms of knowledge and skills. But we have a large variety of knowledge, skills and also aspirations how we could come back and have learned. I can do it in this, in this other country. So I, I can do business here. I can push against my family who says like what? You want to do different types of farming? No son, everybody did rice farming here and this in this way. I said yeah, but I can do. Because I did it two years or 20 years in Singapore. Now I can't do against my father's advice, right. And do organic farming in this village. So large difference in things.

[00:10:39.06] 

That's great. I love those examples. Those are great. I'm curious though, you mentioned these hindrances that you learn, you know, one step of a 50 step process, let's say, which may or may not translate back to your place of origin. And I'm sure that is one of the ways that can offset some of this, some of the benefits of migration. I guess what other. Other challenges or I guess what are the conditions that determine whether an individual's migration can result in these kinds of positive growth, transformational effects versus maybe not. What if there is one or two things, what determines what path that migration takes, that outcome?

[00:11:22.12] 

Wow, that's again it's a good question. I would say also here depends very much on the, on the context and on, on the different of the ways how things and factors on different levels interact here. So you have the like a higher level things, let's say national level policies, right? How migration, whether they are e.g. migrant migration agreements, bilateral agreements that ease labor flow, or whether migrants get training or other support that reduces costs and investment in migration. Then you have obviously factors like if there's a very high risk of. Or high risk level. Let's say if you're living in a coastal area, sea level rise is a constant and large threat There are certain things you can't do, you can't undo with migration remittances. So there's these higher level structural factors. Then there's of course situational factors, like whether you migrate in terms of need and you have to take any job that you can get anywhere that reduces your ability to make a good income, to have a good and safe and hazard free, or a job with little hazards that enables you to work for a longer time, to get promoted and so on, to regularly remit to your home area, for example.

[00:12:51.12] 

So the situational aspect, can you plan, can you choose or do you have to leave now? Now, situational things could be a factor. Then of course, household and individual factors. This might be one of the strongest things that we found. This is not an automatism, it's not a determinant thing. But we could observe that very often very poor and resource depraved and precarious household in the rural areas tend to produce precarious migrants with little education, with little choice of job, what job to take, with sometimes this situational thing, little choice when to migrate, because there's little resources to buffer things. So once certain things happen, health costs arise or whatever, somebody needs to go to the city to get funds, take any job that he or she can get and remit money. And the poor the household, the more dependent they are on their witnesses. And this puts pressure on the migrants. So the migrants will the likelihood that the migrants have difficulties to move up in the in something like a labor or migrant biography, getting more successful jobs, applying for better job, making some savings, enlarging their household, marrying in the city, all these things are much more difficult if you have to send every penny to your household in the place of the region.

[00:14:13.12] 

So the socioeconomic conditions of households play a certain role here, but also the other levels. So you could say that in the end, the social ecological systems, power structures and inequalities in rural areas and on national level, they tend to reproduce poverty and precarity in rural areas, also in urban areas.

[00:14:37.15] 

That's really interesting. Then this is a process that when successful is sometimes referred to as migration as adaptation. Right. Is that a fair way to characterize this? Because zooming out a little bit more to how we talk about migration in the midst of climate change more broadly, I want to turn to this concept and this notion of trans local resilience, which is something you've written about and which needs a little bit of unpacking because it kind of goes over my head. So you've used this phrase, if I'm correct, to talk about the broader context of migration and conceiving of international movement as more than just person A moving from place X to point Y, but person A within a broader context and network. People and individuals and policies and conditions, as you kind of talked about right there. Right.

[00:15:28.11] 

I guess.

[00:15:28.19] 

Can you explain this concept of trans local resilience a bit and why and how it pertains to the discussion of migrating amid climate impacts and climate variability?

[00:15:40.06] 

Yeah, thanks a lot. Well, that's a good. That's a good one. I tried to be brief and clear here. It's not magical mystery work, but it's quite a... It's a complex that... It's a concept that tries to embrace the complexity of processes and structures that we find here. Right. Because what we all often find is, well, in one place migration produces positive outcomes and in other place negative. How can this be? All conditions seem to be similar. But what we first have to keep in mind is we are talking about trans local entities, systems, things. One of our key focus areas is the household, or let's say livelihoods. And our key tenet is that migration is just the starting point because of two things. First, migration is not only happening out of climate change, but it's happening anyway, with or without climate change. There is and there will be migration. The second thing that's even more important, migration is not one person goes to one place to the other, from one place to the other. This is the starting point for this that we take into account here. It's the connections that arise out of this.

[00:16:54.22] 

So a person comes from the village to the city, or goes from the village to the city and stays connected, establishes a household, works there either regularly or irregularly, sends remittances, ideas, whatever connects with his home place on different levels, individuals. A son might send money, especially to her, to his sister for education, but also to the whole household to buy more land or to support the parents in old age and so on. If there's an accident in the city, the household supports the migrant in times of need. So we think that it's necessary to conceive this as one system. So it's a system consisting of people in destination areas, the migrant and relatives and household members in the destination area. Often it's not the migrant alone and people at the origin areas, household members at the origin area and all the connections in between. And then a second important thing in trans local social resilience thinking is scale. Because once we understand that, we have to take both sides into account. It's necessary also to think in terms of individual and household and community level effects and factors here. So you could have one migrant being in precarious situations, under hazardous working conditions, in prostitution whatsoever, and the household gets by through the remittances sent by the migrant.

[00:18:24.06] 

Right. But the overall system is in total imbalance. And we have as a key definition for us, translocal resilience is the ability of these translocal systems, like individuals, households, communities, to deal with risks and to increase or maintain well being without compromising individuals or lower level members well being. And this is an important part. This often falls out of the...

[00:18:56.24] 

[00:18:58.06] 

of the calculation of the perspective. Well then the thing is these, these scales matter the more because we need to see and consider these systems embedded in other levels. So if I say household is the most important level of our consideration here. The livelihoods on a household level, of course these households are embedded in social structures in village level and in social structures in the destination. I also say village. It could also a small town is the origin, right. But they are embedded in different social structures with power imbalances, with inequalities and domination structures and so on. So gender intersectionality and so on matter between the individual and the household, but also in the higher social levels. And then of course you have the embedding in economic structures like in places of destination, factory works and so on. But also in the rural places, in the most cases would be agricultural related activities with all the ecological risks and the social ecologic couplings that are in there. So it's multi place, multi time and multi dimensional things that needs to be taken into account for this trans. Local social resilience. But this helps us a lot understanding the rationalities, why people do something, why they migrate and why they decide in certain to act in certain ways.

[00:20:21.07] 

Once you only have the migrant's perspective, you won't understand things why somebody stays in a hazardous or really precarious situation. Once you understand this is because he or she supports the daughter in the village to finish the school, it makes click and you understand. Okay, now you have to understand the whole system.

[00:20:41.19] 

That's great and that's a really good explanation. I appreciate that. And yeah, I think you're right that it helps account for why people do things that on their face might not make sense. But I can also imagine if you are a. A government or a major international or local organization or an age group or whatever, that also makes your job a lot more complicated, right? Because if there's a migrant who's in sex work or is doing some very difficult job. It's not just that one thing you have to quote, unquote fix, but it's this broader network and system that has to be addressed. Right. How does that, I guess how does this thinking problematize or affect broader actors who work with migrants and developmental issues?

[00:21:25.15] 

Yeah. Interesting. Because then the, I guess one thing that we found, I wouldn't say missing, but very far, I would say underdeveloped, let's put it like that, is the consideration of migration in many sectoral policies. When we are talking about the silos of sectoral policies, I would say in most countries, in most contexts, policies or ministries or sectoral thinkers are trying to build bridges between those silos. But migration is always far away from these, from rural or agricultural development, from taxation, from infrastructure, from local, regional, national development policies and also practices, if you talk to practitioners. So that was one of our key findings that, oh, it's interesting. Migration can be or should be taken into account. Not everywhere. It's of course that you could say this is our desk perspective, we have migration lenses on. So of course we say migration is important, but in many ways it doesn't take lots of additional resources to consider migration actively as one factor in any kind of political or policy works or planning activities, community activities and so on. Other than saying like, oh, interesting. We had these discussions and these, these discourses with, with our partners, like, well, migration.

[00:22:57.24] 

Yeah. One day you go to village, make a community meeting and two months later you come for the next meeting and there are different people. This migration is a nuisance. So what do you do about that? Like I did. So it's just annoying. It's okay, but you can turning mud to gold, maybe not that, but you can at least take into account say, okay, so but then did you ever try to get these migrants connected, people staying in Singapore with a mobile phone? You can easily connect them on WhatsApp line or whatever, social media and say like, okay, there's a community meeting, do you want to participate? Put the phone here and just lesson or ask people in the meeting in the community like, okay, ask your migrant relatives and next week we meet again and you get their response in here. So there are numerous ways of actively taking that into account. And the second thing is, and this is one of our other key ideas, things that it's not magical mystery work. It's pretty evident once you improve the situation of migrants, it's very likely that this translates also improvement of situation of people, people and people in places of origin.

[00:24:04.13] 

So once you increase minimum wages, once you provide people with real contracts, social insurance and so on and so forth. We're talking now in terms of developing countries, but not only we have many, many countries where migrant workers, and we see this in COVID times, are among the most disadvantaged groups that we can observe in terms of job security, exposure to risk and hazards and so on, on. So once we improve situation of migrants through less dependency on rural places, on places of origin, emergencies like COVID now, or to the ability to have a more stable income and maybe better contribute to household translocal household situations and livelihoods, you automatically improve situation of people in other places. So I think that's a, that's a thing to consider in the development work as well.

[00:24:59.09] 

I want to close out by turning to this issue of COVID which you just brought up. Obviously, the pandemic has really dramatically slowed, if not entirely halted, a lot of global movement. I know there's been reporting on how that's affected financial remittances in which a lot of places, not every place, but a lot of place, they've really, really scaled back. What have you seen and what can you say about how the pandemic this last year or so has affected these financial social networks and systems that seem to be, if not the lifeblood, very important for a lot of individuals and communities? Because what's happened over the last year because of the pandemic and how many of these impacts are going to be not just one year pandemic but and go back to normal, quote, unquote, but are going to be felt over the longer term?

[00:25:46.23] 

Wow. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, we have, what we have up to now is pretty well scattered anecdotal evidence of what is happening. There has been little, I don't know, there might be attempts, but up to now there has been little research published. That takes time, normally long time, but also from our networks, what people do. We know that some people are working on that, but it's not really a broader knowledge base that is already there. What we do know is that migration has been not coming to standstill, but there have been considerable barriers to movement. People had been forced to return to their home countries due to various reasons, passport issues and people got expelled. But in many cases people just lost their jobs because companies had to close down. Public services had reduced their activities. The informal sector had big problems because once there's a lockdown, nobody goes to the street. You don't need public transportation, you don't need street food vendors and so on. So there's all these kind of things that migrants had lost income. Many of them had to return. Exact numbers nobody knows alone. In India there's estimates between 10 and 20 million domestic migrants returned to their home places home villages with all the adverse consequences.

[00:27:14.09] 

Many dozens or hundreds. I don't know the exact figures on people died on the road because they were stuck in limbo between while trying to on foot cross internal borders to reach their home places and so on. There's all these kind of stories. So the stopping of migration routes and the blocking of migration was one issue. The blocking of translocal connectivity was another one. Partly people couldn't remit money because they couldn't leave their houses. They couldn't go to the, to the international banking points sending money. Same same thing in villages where, where lockdowns were not imposed that strictly but so the trans local linkages were blocked, people couldn't visit, they couldn't move. So that's, that was serious consequences in place and we have anecdotal evidence where this hit really hard. Yeah but still we don't have much, much, much good knowledge on that. We are currently conducting research in that in a number of countries. I think there will be some results in the next coming months. How this will be translating into future things, I don't know what we can see. Things are slowly, slowly getting up to normal in some places again at least concerning domestic mobility, international mobility in many places it's still again in the second lockdown and second or maybe third wave being blocked again I don't know.

[00:28:49.12] 

That's pretty unclear. There are predictions that migration or migrants might be more under scrutiny as one of the things that turned out that migrants have been portrayed by media by right wing or right wing groups as vectors of disease. So there might be more hostility towards migrants, migrants who might save more problems in crossing borders. And I guess these are things that should be also addressed on international level. To think about this when we're talking about the International Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration. Now this gets even more important. Safe, especially safe migration.

[00:29:38.08] 

We should probably wrap up the conversation there but this has been super interesting and I've learned a lot. Harald, thank you so much for coming on today. This has been fun. Harald Sterly is a senior scientist in the University of Vienna's Department of Geography. His article for the Migration Information Source is called Building Climate Resilience through Migration in Thailand. Thank you for listening to this episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Please subscribe through your podcast servers of choice and if you enjoyed this talk, I'd also encourage you to subscribe to the podcast from my MPI colleague Meghan Benton, which explores what the world will look like after COVID-19. That's called Moving Beyond Pandemic. You can also find every episode of both of our podcasts online in our archives at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. Our full collection of analysis on how climate change affects migration is online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. If you want to get in touch, you can send me an email at [email protected] and follow MPI on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This podcast was produced by Yoseph Hamid and Kenia Guerrero and made possible by Julia Yanoff and Lisa Dixon, with oversight from Michelle Mittelstadt. The music you're listening to is called Touch by Patrick Patrikios.

[00:31:11.03] 

My name is Julian Hattem. Thank you for tuning in.