Is Climate Change Driving Migration from Central America?

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CHAPTERS 

[00:00:03]: Is climate change driving migration from Central America? 

[00:03:50]: Drought in Central America: natural variability and climate trends 

[00:05:16]: Rising temperatures, soil moisture, and crop losses 

[00:09:09]: How farmers respond: from food insecurity to migration decisions 

[00:14:29]: Why migration is difficult to predict—even with climate data 

[00:24:14]: Structural drivers: poverty, governance, and long-term vulnerability

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:03.07] 

Hello and welcome back from the Migration Policy Institute. This is Changing Climate, Changing Migration, the podcast that explores the different ways climate change is impacting the way people move around the planet. My name is Julian Hattem. I'm the editor of MPI's journal, the Migration Information Source, and we're bringing you this podcast as part of our focus on climate change and migration. You can read our collection of articles about the issue at migrationpolicy.org/climate. In the Americas, one of the things that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years is the movement of migrants from Central America, particularly the so called Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Though migrants from these countries make up a pretty small percentage of immigrants in, for instance, the United States, their movements north have become a focus of policymakers, journalists and the public writ large, especially when it occurs in high profile caravans like the ones we've seen since 2018. According to some analysis, this migration is being driven by climate change. Drought in the region's dry corridor, which runs along Central America's Pacific coast from southern Mexico down to Panama, has been an issue of concern for several years.

[00:01:22.05] 

And in November 2020, problems got worse when Hurricanes Ida and Iota slammed into the region. To help make sense of what's going on here, I'm happy to be able to talk to Diego Pons. Diego is an applied climatologist at Colorado State University who researches how humans and the environment interact with each other, and he's done research on Central American farmers, among other issues. So, Diego, thanks so much for coming on.

[00:01:47.06] 

Thank you for having me.

[00:01:49.00] 

So let's start with the big question, how much of the migration from Central America is being driven by climate change?

[00:01:56.13] 

So that's a good question, Julian. In fact, we have a lot of incomplete data sets. We have some lack of understanding of the full mechanisms behind certain conditions that we're observing on the ground, and it's a difficult question to answer. In fact, many of the data sets that we're currently using are having some difficulties identifying the spatial distribution of precipitation or the magnitude of precipitation. If we attempt to derive conclusions on causality behind this, we might be just not telling the whole story on the other side, trying to correlate this with migration. We also have incomplete information on the other side. On the migration side, one of the data sets we currently use is apprehensions in the US as a proxy to migration from Central America into the us but that is also incomplete. One of the things that we know is that not everybody's apprehended a border and so at the end, trying to connect the dots requires an in depth analysis and acknowledging of the complexities behind this. So I cannot tell exactly, you know, hey, this is A equals B here because it's A. It's not a linear road that way.

[00:03:21.00] 

But you talked about questions on both sides there, both in the region, questions about the precipitation levels, and also questions about what immigration or what migration northbound is looking like in the region. I mentioned drought. How much do we know about the drought that has been going on in this region? What can we say about it? And particularly, I mean, can we attribute it to climate change or is this places have droughts sometimes and this is just a drought that is unconditioned to climate change?

[00:03:50.19] 

Yep, this is a great follow up. So we've done research at several timescales in Central America. Myself and a group of other scientists from other universities in the US and in Guatemala have done research on, we've done research on paleoclimatology, so reconstructing previous centuries of precipitation in the region. And we found at that level, at that scale, what tree rings can tell us is that droughts were not out of the ordinary in the region. Now that's accumulated precipitation at a seasonal scale derived from tree rings. Drought is more complex than that. Right. And I wanted to drive the attention to an important factor here. And we tend to not talk about soil moisture, for instance, or evapotranspiration. The reason why I'm mentioning this is because in the last 2014, 2015 and 2016, drought that was attributable to El Nino phenomena. As we know, El Nino is part of natural variability. It's driven by oceanic conditions and atmospheric conditions interacting with and naturally. We know this, that when there is an El Nino, specifically an intense El Nino, we could expect droughts in Central America. This drought, however, can be influenced by what we do know about climate change, which is temperatures have gone up in Central America.

[00:05:16.08] 

We know that is one of those certainties that we have when it comes to Central America and climate. And so there are interactions there that you can start to think about, right? If we have natural variability like El Nino or La Nina, but in addition to that drought, right, that mechanistic shift of the precipitation and the winds, what if just rising the temperature in Central America is enough to lower soil moisture, for instance, and therefore we could have crop losses all over the place. In fact, during the 1998 El Nino that was the case. We have an extent drought, an extent a midsummer drought as well. You know, precipitation in Central America is usually divided in a bimodal precipitation regime. So two peaks in the year of precipitation. That valley in between was really, really low. And that dictates some of the sowing dates as well. So it is. I'm trying to just explain the complexity behind this. So if we have increasing temperatures despite precipitation doing whatever, let's just say precipitation remains the same. Just increasing that temperature could have an impact on, for instance, agricultural endeavors. Right.

[00:06:29.14] 

It's not just rainfall or precipitation.

[00:06:31.15] 

It's not just rainfall.

[00:06:32.13] 

There's a couple of things going on. Okay.

[00:06:34.05] 

Exactly. In fact, if you analyze, you know, monthly data on precipitation, there's little variance actually. That doesn't mean that our instrumental data and even satellite data can capture differences that are affecting farmers on the ground. We've heard from farmers that the precipitation regime is changing, not only starting dates. Right. But the length of the midsummer drought is changing. They've. They have expressed this and they know what they're talking about. Right. They've seen it firsthand. They can count the damage and unfortunately, it has an impact on their mobility. Mobility and mortality. Right. It's really hard when this actually comes to be a reality. So currently we are trying to do more research in that topic and understanding, well, this disconnection between the narrative on the farmers and what we see on precipitation. And again, the story might be more complex than that. Let's just consider the incremental temperatures in Central America. Let's consider evapotranspiration rates and soil moisture. What is happening on the ground that these farmers are actually trying to tell us? So it's from a scientist perspective, we need to be more humble in terms of how we approach this. And this is where I think disciplines like geography can bring this together on the human environment interactions.

[00:07:58.11] 

But I think we're starting to scratch the surface of these complexities. New data sets are becoming available. We're understanding more by integrating multidisciplinary research on the ground. Records of crops are actually incomplete at best in Central America. So we are also starting to capture some of those records, actually, because people like a decade ago started to notice, oh, this is important, relevant for ourselves to then make those correlations. So I think altogether, considering all the factors, we are literally starting to just scratch the surface of these complexities. Yeah, sorry, I'm not going to say, hey, this is a drought and next day people is out. Because I've seen many different cases around this. I have seen those. I have seen small farmers whose coffee is going down because low market prices. So there's intersections there with many other ways in which people is affected.

[00:09:05.14] 

And so I guess to talk about, let's talk about those people then instead of talking about the environment which is. And the climate issues which are as you know, pretty complex. So about the people, there's a UN report from I think 2017 that it found about half of the households in these countries from which someone had migrated, that these households were food secure, food insecure rather. That is obviously a huge amount listeners of to the show. We'll note in previous episodes we've talked about the link between food insecurity and migration and kind of the obvious, seemingly obvious connection that not having enough food can affect one's decision to migrate. But I know Diego, you like to complicate that process, right? It's not simply much like you like to complicate the questions of drought. It's not simply the case that precipitation or temperatures are slightly different and you can't grow as much and so therefore you pick up and leave and move northward.

[00:10:01.16] 

But there.

[00:10:02.10] 

But instead that some of these environmental and climatic changes in variability can cause really the destabilization and the undermining of entire agricultural systems. Right. Which can either force people to look for ways to adapt and migration might be one of those ways to adapt. Can you walk me through the process of what is happening on the ground in terms of these farmers, the coffee farmers who I know you spent a lot of time with, or others, and how they are responding to these environmental changes and how migration fits in with the environmental and food insecurity challenges they're facing.

[00:10:39.24] 

Right. So many, many questions there. I'm going to start with social networks and safety nets. If you think about any entrepreneur, any person going to do business who doesn't have access to loans, who doesn't have obviously credits and soft credits and insurance, I don't know, it's difficult for someone to just manage the whole risk of any business. Now we're talking about smallholder agriculturalists, the majority of them who are actually doing this, you know, trying to run their, their, their business, their plots, which usually are small, very small by the way.05 hectares or so without any other support. Right. It's literally them going by themselves, usually having help from the family itself. But you know, if, if and climate is going to hit, there's going to be climate shocks, right? That's inevitable. Is climate variability potential climate change in the future as well. Farmers elsewhere and farmers of any other size will actually transfer that risk to an insurance company. Again, the same land size allows them to have access to credits. But this smallholder farmers are put in this place where they cannot count on this. Just picture the case in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

[00:12:09.14] 

This extended droughts associated with only new, let's say the first year. Well, you lost your crop. Then you plant again because you have some seeds that you were planning to use on the second, on the segunda, right, on the second sowing date. But then you decide to use it to just catch what is left of precipitation that first cycle, but then it failed again, and then you're left with nothing. And so you decide to sell part of your plot, right, to pay for those seeds and inputs. Obviously it's more than seeds. It's fertilizers, it's pesticides. There's a lot of other things. And then the third year, and this is three years in a row of droughts, and then you have. What do you have left? You know, again, there's no access to credit. So maybe a family member is willing to give you some money or not. That might be the case. But usually there's other coping mechanisms, including migration. Right. So what I'm trying to exemplify here is that it's just not again, a deterministic, oh, lack of precipitation. And then I leave. But people do try to adapt. People has been adapting for a long time.

[00:13:14.20] 

It's just, you know, when the bread basket prices are going up, when low coffee prices and other commodities are going down, right. And you cannot harvest the coffee because it's not profitable. So then you don't hire unskilled labor to help you in the farm. These people are left with few options. Really, really few options. And some of them are not lucky enough to go through the next cycle. And then they migrate to the cities to look for an urban job which usually don't pay as well anyways. And so it's a very complex situation if you add lack of access to health, right. So again, those safety needs that I was talking about, familiar family members might be one. But you know, the system, the social system in, in place should also have your back at some point, right? And it doesn't. And then access to improved seeds can be complicated. So it's, it's, it's again, complex. So coffee farmers, so that was the case of smallholder farmers who might have a, they might have a plot, right? And they're doing agricultural Andovers themselves. And then they might actually have half a job picking coffee too.

[00:14:31.02] 

And there the story is also complicated because we have had the lowest prices in a couple of years in a row where production costs were higher than what they were being paid naturally, you're working at a loss. And that's also complicated because coffee farmers have experienced climate variability and change in addition to this market. Very stressful situations associated with market prices. Right. So I don't know, I don't know if, you know, if we go talk on agriculture at large, each large farmer, small holder farmer, they are all facing this challenges associated with climate. So in a sense there is an impact on climate and agriculture. And agriculture. Right. It's just the lines are not straight. You have to connect the dots there.

[00:15:29.10] 

So I guess let's talk about connecting the dots. I mean, how easy is it to connect those dots ahead of time? And I guess what I'm asking is how easy is it to predict migratory movements and other types of adaptations based on individual events? Let's say we could go back in time six, seven years before the 2014 drought. And we knew there would be a drought. Would we be able to predict, could we predict, did we predict who was going to migrate, who was going to take other strategies to mitigate what was happening or talk to me about the thought process there and the challenges in predictions.

[00:16:08.03] 

So great first challenge is incomplete data sets. We just started with this conversation stating that. Right. So that's the biggest, you know, limitation that any modeling agent would have. Right. If you need to model, you need to have the best data. It's a, it's to say that goes like, you know, whatever you put in the model is whatever you're going to get. So let's put high quality data and we could expect something that approaches reality, but still a model. Right. And within what we have, it's limited. The amount of modeling and forecasting that we can do here is limited in terms of we don't know where these people is currently working in this coffee fincas. Right. We don't really know how many of them are working there. We don't really know how many of them lack access to Social Security. But we do know other information. We know again that the breadbasket is going up. It's pretty much steady. The last 30 years has been steady up. We do know that coffee prices are low. And so that's trying to draw some of the vulnerability indicators that we could try to include in a model to forecast this.

[00:17:19.23] 

And the other side, on the climate side, there's been great advances when it comes to the forecasting systems. The Columbia University is just released the next generation of seasonal climate forecast. And it's an amazing system which actually has predictive skill when it comes to precipitation, temperature and so forth, bringing them all together. There is, there's a signal there, there's a signal that we could use at some point to understand again, if, if we, if we figure out the mechanisms behind all this data sets that could eventually, you know, influence a farmer decision to migrate, then we could work on it. But again, it's just beginning to work. We're starting to have this new forecast systems, we're starting to get new information on the ground through many agents and agencies that are working with us. So I guess to answer your question, there's hope that sometime we could do this if the right data set is used as input.

[00:18:27.00] 

And you talked about the project from Columbia. I know you've also done some projections of future rainfall and precision precipitation in the dry corridor. Right. I mean, what is the future likely to look like from an environmental perspective? To the extent that we know.

[00:18:43.03] 

Right, that's also a good question. And yeah, is this, is this, you know, different timescales in climate? Right. We were just talking about seasonal forecasting so next three months. And we are pretty good at that because we understand current mechanisms and we understand the initial conditions in this short term forecasting. We also know, you know, sea surface temperature is the main driver of changes worldwide. So we can have a pretty good approach to this seasonal forecasting. Now shifting from that timescale towards the end of the century incorporates a lot more of uncertainties. That being said, models are, you know, you can run a model backwards to try to understand how good it is on reconstructing known climate and they're pretty good. So our, our trust is there, our, you know, hope is there. But remember that these climate models are driven mostly on behavior. It's not, you know, the math is the math and thermodynamics is the thermodynamics. Right. But the driver between each of the potential scenarios in climate is actually how much carbon dioxide we were going to put out. And that just imagine how hard it is to figure out what policies are going to be in place, let's say not even in the next five years.

[00:20:01.23] 

But you know, what policies are going to be in place in 30 years to try to limit this amount of CO2. So again, when you include behavior, human behavior in this, then it becomes more complex. And if you add politics, then there's another layer of complications. So the uncertainties are mostly attributed to that, to behavior and CO2, radiative forcing that is completely behavioral. And so each of those scenarios has different outputs. The more extreme the business as usual will have the largest impact. And you could say the wettest regions are going to get wetter, the dryers are going to get drier, potentially

[00:20:50.01] 

the

[00:20:50.08] 

high pressure systems are going to be more stronger than they are now and enhance atmospheric circulation pattern overall. That will include droughts in most of Central America, but again with large uncertainties towards the end of the century. Now we talk about climate change. Currently the trend, again, temperature is very clearly going up and that is something we could actually start to incorporate in our models and our knowledge.

[00:21:21.10] 

So let's talk about the nearer term and I guess particularly what could be done in the nearer term to address what's happening in America. So you and I are both based in the US. The Biden administration has talked about $4 billion, I think, investing in the so called root causes of migration in Central America. From a geographic, climatological, environmental perspective. What are the things that that money could be used for to help local governments, community groups, international organizations do to mitigate the impact of this climate variability on these farmers and others, and which could in turn affect their propensity to migration?

[00:22:01.20] 

Right. That's the hardest question to throw at me thus far because I think that just dealing with the top of the iceberg, which might be increased climate variability or climate extremes, it's not necessarily going to solve it, right? It's not going to go to the root of the problem. Corruption is a big deal in these countries. Corruption undermines access to health, access to fair fertilizers, access to seeds. So that's for me the biggest point that we should attack under this administration. So that said, there's other things that we can help improve. For instance, again, the new seasonal forecast system is already in place in Guatemala with the MET Service. We ourselves made sure that institutionalization was the biggest part of this project, right? We wanted to be out of there, having had the system in place and the technical capacities to fix it, improve it and create their own. And that's a reality nowadays. Climate information in that sense can be used to inform good practices on the ground, right? Like optimal sowing dates, optimal fertilization schemes. So it could ease the agricultural end of wars, but only pair with resources for action, right? A climate forecast is worthless if there's no money to actually put those activities on the ground.

[00:23:38.13] 

Right? And so again, this is where poverty, those structural challenges that we have in Guatemala and in all Central America, with structural poverty, violence and all these other complexities and social vulnerabilities, a poor education system needs to be addressed, right? It's not only providing these climate services that is going to help us out. It's a good start and is going on the right direction, but it needs to be addressed from the deeper vulnerabilities that are in depth rooted in Guatemala.

[00:24:14.13] 

That's probably a pretty good point to wrap it up on. So yeah, thank you so much for coming on Diego. This was super interesting. Diego Pons is an applied climatologist and assistant professor at Colorado State University, where he researches human environment interactions and implications for policy and development. He wrote an article for MPI's Migration Information Source, which touches on some of the points we talked about here, and that's called Climate Extremes, Food Insecurity, and Migration in Central America: A Complicated Nexus. Thanks so much for listening to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. If you enjoyed my chat with Diego, I'd encourage you to check out the other episodes of the podcast. Those are in our archives at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts and they're also available on your podcast app of choice. Subscribe to make sure you catch each and every new episode. You should also check out Diego's article and our full catalog of writing on climate change and migration at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Get in touch by sending us an email at [email protected]. We'd love to hear what you think we're doing well and other questions we could explore on the show. This episode of the podcast was produced by Yoseph Hamid and Kenia Guerrero and made possible by Julia Yanoff, Michelle Mittelstadt, and Lisa Dixon.

[00:25:40.06] 

Our theme music is a song called Touch by Patrick Patrikios. I'm Julian Hattem. Thank you for listening.