Migrate or Adapt? How Pacific Islanders Respond to Climate Change

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CHAPTERS 

[00:01:55]: Climate risks in the Pacific: sea level rise, erosion, and daily impacts 

[00:05:36]: Migration or adaptation? How communities make decisions 

[00:08:09]: What is adaptive capacity—and why it shapes mobility 

[00:10:56]: How Tuvalu is adapting: coastal protection and policy choices 

[00:12:54]: Kiribati and “migration with dignity”: expanding mobility options 

[00:14:58]: Why Pacific governments prioritize voluntary migration 

[00:17:55]: Adaptation pathways: flexible planning under uncertainty 

[00:21:03]: Land, sovereignty, and the decision to stay 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00.06] 

Welcome back to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. This is a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that interviews top experts to explore the different ways that climate change is impacting migration around the planet. I'm Julian Hattem, I'm your host and I'm the editor of MPI's journal called the Migration Information Source. This podcast is part of our dedicated focus on on climate change and migration, which also includes a special series of articles. You can find those at migrationpolicy.org/climate. A recurring theme of this podcast has been the potential for climate events and environmental change to drive migration. But that word potential is really important. Climate factors can help tip the scales for an individual to decision to migrate, but migration is not necessarily inevitable, and in many cases it might not be what the local communities want to do most. My guest today is Carol Farbotko. She's an adjunct research fellow at the University of the Sunshine coast in Australia and an adjunct researcher at the University of Tasmania, also in Australia. She focuses on climate change adaptation and mobility, particularly in the Pacific islands, and she recently wrote a report for MPI called New Approaches to Climate Change and Migration Building the Adaptive Capacity of Mobile Populations, which outlines a flexible model of responding to situations of climate change.

[00:01:29.21] 

Carol, welcome. Thank you for coming on.

[00:01:32.08] 

Thank you. It's lovely to be here.

[00:01:35.05] 

So it would be great to start with a bit of a background. Can you give us a very broad overview of the situation in some of the Pacific islands that you've studied? Places like Kiribati, for instance, get a lot of attention in public conversations. What kind of environmental threats are communities there facing and how does migration fit in as a possible response?

[00:01:55.05] 

So there are a range of threats that impact on all aspects of life in the Pacific. Many are associated with the problem of sea level rise, but they also include extreme weather events, soil salinity, and coastal erosion. But there's wide ranging flow on effects to to things like food and water security, health, infrastructure, urban planning, fishing, agriculture, and so on. So migration is only one of many possible responses. When sea level rise and coastal erosion events happen, for example, people are unlikely to migrate long distances due to environmental pressures alone. So we must always be careful to fully understand why people are moving. So for example, migration from rural to urban areas can be influenced by economic and social factors such as access to work and health or education services in the Pacific, as well as by environmental factors. On the other hand, movement associated with environmental pressures is often quite local, so it is often not really classifiable as migration at all in the Pacific islands. Many rural villages are located on customarily owned land. And if there are environmental threats to housing or other village resources, there are decisions being made to move in some of these communities.

[00:03:23.17] 

But these movements are quite small distances inland, maybe just a few hundred meters or a couple of kilometers, and the populations involved are remaining within the land that they already customarily own. Moving to a different group's land a bit further away is, is not typically desired by the people moving, nor would it be something that's easy to achieve. And some of these types of relocations are occurring in Fiji where the government is facilitating some of the moves and has identified vulnerable coastal communities and assisting with the processes. And this kind of movement we call climate mobility, which is a broader and more encompassing term than climate migration. But to talk more about also long distance movement, either international migration or rural urban migration within a country is very difficult to attribute to climate change alone. So there is much debate about the small, low lying nation states like Tuvalu and Kiribati. They may potentially need to relocate their entire national populations since all of their territory is low lying and coastal. But at this stage from these countries, it is only individuals and family units who migrate. Individuals can make that choice, but there are no specific climate migration channels to facilitate it.

[00:04:56.05] 

If people decide to leave the country, they must use their existing migration avenues, such as New Zealand's Pacific Access category, which allows a limited number of working age people to migrate each year.

[00:05:09.21] 

Whether that's kind of international migration or more localized, just mobility, moving from one town in one region which is one kilometer to another, I guess how do we think about that movement? Is it just a function of the inability to adapt in place for these communities in response to sea level rise, other impacts of climate change? Or I guess another way of asking that is, does failure to adapt in place always lead to mobility slash migration?

[00:05:36.16] 

No, migration is not necessarily a failure to adapt. So the Tuvaluans and I Kiribati people who have been moving internationally, for instance, have been doing for a few decades, but not necessarily to escape current or immediate environmental threats. So they're more likely to cite a range of reasons for moving abroad, such as finding better economic and education opportunities and for their children to have a more secure future. So they're sort of doing a proactive move before the environmental threats become too much. But having said that, many, many do also want to stay. So migration and adaptation shouldn't really be understood as sort of opposites of each other. They're looking at, if you like, if you move your house inland, away from flood risk, that might be highly successful for your family's adaptation. But then again, your neighbor may decide that they want to stay put in the same kind of area because that's where their ancestors are buried. And we don't necessarily call that maladaptation if that's an active choice to do that. So we almost have to ask who has decided. Sort of dig a little bit deeper and decide who has decided the place is high risk as well.

[00:06:53.06] 

Because sometimes, you know, it's not just about individuals or families or villages making these decisions. There are, you know, other institutions involved who might have an interest in people moving elsewhere for their. For other reasons under the guise of moving people to safety. Or who has conducted the risk assessment that says this place is no longer safe to live. Has that risk assessment taken into account the local knowledge of how to live safely in that place and even in the, you know, increased environmental pressures, such as coastal flooding. So in that sense, the inability to adapt in place does not always lead to migration or mobility. And then they're dynamic and they're context dependent. So, for instance, displacement during a disaster is common, but many people might eventually return to rebuild better. So we've got a combination of both mobility and adaptation happening.

[00:07:50.13] 

In your paper for MPI, you use this phrase, adaptive capacity, which you use to describe a feature of households and communities confronted by climate extremes. Natural disasters, I guess. Can you describe or explain adaptive capacity and how it fits into this conversation?

[00:08:07.16] 

Sure. Adaptive capacity is the potential to adapt to changes such as the increase in the number of natural disasters that a community might experience. So it's useful because I think it helps navigate the complex context of adaptation and mobility, the type of things I just discussed. So it does involve identifying individual and household characteristics, what their resources are, as well as the cultural and social context. But it also gives the big picture of the relevant institutions involved. And these can range from financial organizations to infrastructure providers to local social organizations, or all of this plays a role in determining what adaptive capacity might look like. So this complexity, once you take all that into account, it does make it quite difficult to predict who will be rendered particularly vulnerable by climate hazards and even more difficult to predict who might move. But another thing to consider is that adaptive capacity can facilitate adaptation in place for some people, but for others it also, even in the same population, it might mean that they move in adaptive ways. So we have to take all that into account. Adaptive capacity can be distributed through social networks across distances, so people who have connections elsewhere often have higher adaptive capacity

[00:09:30.22] 

than those who do not. And this type of thinking is quite common among those who study migration, but it still needs to be better understood in the adaptation sector. So this is sort of, you know, where my work comes to try and bring in knowledge of what's happening, you know, when people move as well as what's happening in terms of adaptation, which is often only focused on single sites.

[00:09:54.24] 

I'd love to get like specific if we can. You talked about Tuvalu, which is a small country comprised of a few islands in the South Pacific. For reader for listeners who might not be familiar, low lying communities there face some pretty serious risks in terms of things like erosion, rising sea levels. But these are small islands, right. And people there isn't necessarily always other places to go nearby with on the island. So what are the adaptation strategies that communities, the Tuvalu government are taking to confront some of these hazards and how does migration fit in as part of that broader picture? To the extent that it does. Yes,

[00:10:33.17] 

yes, it's right that in Tuvalu it's very and Kiribati it's very difficult to move communities of to safer, more inland places because basically the small, very small islands are so narrow that there is no inland. So the government in these places in Tuvalu in particular is taking a range of approaches to address climate change and has been for a very long time actually. So one of the key strategies is to lobby at the international level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But there's also been a process of mainstreaming climate change considerations across many aspects of governance in Tuvalu, including social and economic development, infrastructure and so on. And migration is a part of that, but it's quite a small part of that. It's currently migration is currently positioned in the national policy as a choice for individuals if they wish to migrate internally or internationally. But a very big focus is on climate proofing the coasts of the small islands, including large fortification projects to build up the islands against sea level rise. And this is because the first choice of the government and much of the population is to stay in Tuvalu as long as possible.

[00:11:49.02] 

So any form of wholesale population relocation is considered very much a last resort. But that last resort option is being enshrined in national policy. It's definitely being taken seriously, but it's not the priority at this stage.

[00:12:05.19] 

So Kiribati, there's a policy there called migration with dignity, which it sounds like speaks to some of the this tightrope that governments, policymakers, communities are trying to walk. Can you explain that how does that differ? What are the features of that policy?

[00:12:19.19] 

Yeah, sure, it's actually, yeah, it's been a very well known policy, although it has, it was introduced by a previous government about, probably about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit longer now, and a different government has come in and actually repealed it. But it's, it's, it's very much held up as a, as a model of, you know, what climate migration policy might look like. So the, again, Kiribati has the similar sort of approach to Tuvalu of climate proofing the islands as much as possible. But the migration with dignity policy was really quite novel in providing a framework through which migration opportunities, particularly international ones, could be improved for the citizens of Kiribati. But this was both in terms of circular migration, going abroad to work or study and going back, but also expanding permanent international migration options. So it focused on both. And under this scheme, the focus would be on the upskilling of people. So it was very much about development of the, of the, of the Kiribati population to be able to work in international labor opportunities. And this would be a no regrets approach and give people multiple choices. People could get the skills to work abroad and send remittances home.

[00:13:44.15] 

They could also return home at different times to contribute skills in the islands. And for instance, there was a scheme where nurses could be trained in Australia and they could either stay in Australia and apply for permanent, permanent residency in Australia or they could move back to Kiribati and work as nurses in Kiribati, which was, and the nurses were needed in both places. So people had these choices. And then, so that, and then also it would be about expanding the Kiribati diaspora internationally. You know, over time there would be more people living abroad, which may eventually help any sort of, you know, more whole holistic national movement at a later stage, should it be needed. But this policy hasn't been pursued at the moment. It's, it's been sort of dormant now that there's a new government.

[00:14:35.22] 

That's interesting, but, but it seems like at least in these two, both of these countries, there is a little strong focus on personal choice and kind of a real effort to eschew any sort of notion about that compulsory movement or really coercing people into movement. It really seems very focused on voluntary efforts. Is that, is that a fair description?

[00:14:58.02] 

Absolutely. Yep, that's exactly right. And I think that's very much sort of, yeah. Working against this idea that, you know, these people are just super vulnerable and need some sort of you know, humanitarian assistance, it's much more about, no, what choices can we give our citizens to help them make the decisions that are right for them in this changing climate that we're facing?

[00:15:23.24] 

Without going too much into politics, I'm curious, what about that works and what about that does not work? I guess, what are the successes and the failures of that? Because I can imagine that on the one hand, it's probably more expensive to enable this voluntary nature when money is always short, especially when you're dealing with developmental issues. But obviously it seems like it's popular, or at least voluntary things tend to be more popular than coercive methods.

[00:15:51.06] 

So

[00:15:51.11] 

yeah. What would you say the successes and troubles, I guess, of this general approach has been?

[00:15:57.05] 

To be honest, I think it's very successful. I mean, people are happy with the way the government is planning for a difficult future. There still remains to be specific migration channels worked out because at the moment, you know, the only people who can migrate internationally are people of a certain working age. So it's limited in terms of who can access it. And that should be something that could be focused on in the future. But, you know, in, I guess the, the big, the biggest sort of difficulty is actually the staying in place. People are happy that the government is working on things like land reclamation, but that's very expensive. And it's not necessarily a permanent solution. So, you know, the land reclamation might work for 20 years, but then it needs to be done again. So, you know, because erosion is still happening. So it's not, it's not a, you know, these are dynamic atoll environments. They... Building up a sort of solid fortification of them is actually quite difficult and super expensive. So the, the, it's, it's sort of a solution for the moment. But what happens in 20 years? Do we need to do it again?

[00:17:22.21] 

Where are we going to get the finance for that? That's a, that's a question.

[00:17:26.12] 

Yeah. You, you talk about this notion of an adaptation, adaptation pathways approach, which you've positioned as a slightly more flexible response to some of the other efforts to, to combat the impacts of climate change through migration, I guess. Can you talk about that? Can you describe that? And is that another way of making sure that policymakers take a more holistic view of the situation? Because how can we think of adaptation pathways as a response?

[00:17:55.14] 

Yes, well, it's a sort of a stepwise approach to decision making that can be used in local to international kind of projects and planning arenas where decisions are made incrementally and adapted along the way, rather than planning projects out in their entirety before this, before they start. So this can be sort of applied, for instance, to a national climate change adaptation sort of policy approach, which is sort of the things I've been discussing until in Tuvalu and Kiribati, where they're not just focusing on relocation or adaptation in place, they're focusing on both simultaneously and having, you know, certain triggers for what might happen. So the trigger is at the moment, if you're, if an individual wants to migrate, that's fine. But we're also going to, you know, work on financing for our fortification of coasts. So that's, that's sort of adaptation pathways is working at the moment. There are different pathways in terms of, you know, different segments of the population, and that's still, you know, it's work in progress, but that's sort of the way things have been set up to be flexible, to take account of new information, to take account of new social environmental conditions.

[00:19:12.21] 

You know, there may become a point, say in 20 years where the Tuvalu population is more interested in international migration options. So that could be triggered because it's already in the policy. But at the moment it's not, it's not necessarily the focus, but it also helps to, you know, build, build consensus and learning along the way. So they're very flexible and very sort of adaptive ways of approaching these very difficult problems. Because it is a very difficult problem. You know, do we stay or do we go? It's, it's, it's, it's been a very, you know, very difficult problem for these small countries for a very long time. So I think the way they're dealing with it in terms of, you know, like the migration with dignity policy was very flexible, very much a pathways approach. And what they're doing in Tuvalu is similar. They've also done similar policies in Fiji in terms of local relocation of villages. So it's, it's, it's, it's working and it's quite sort of, I guess, advanced in globally in terms of climate mobility policy. So the Pacific is almost like leading the way internationally.

[00:20:21.06] 

I can, if you'll allow me to. I can imagine a criticism in which maybe this is perhaps pessimistic or nihilistic, but people will say, we know the sea level is rising. It's these extreme climate events and extreme climate changes are inevitable in some degree. Is it not just forestalling the inevitable to allow people to make this decision and to invest in, in adaptation strategies which, as you note, might have to be done every 20 years. And every 20 years again, all of which is expensive, which is time consuming, I guess. How do you, what is the response to criticism like that?

[00:21:03.24] 

Yeah, yeah, it's a good, it's a very good point. And of course that's something that, you know, the, the, the people of these countries take very seriously. So it's, I guess, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the west we might say, you know, we just. If our house is under threat from an environmental threat, well, why not sell it and move somewhere else? But it doesn't necessarily work that way when you're an indigenous person with very strong connections to your land. And on top of that, in the case of Kiribati and Tuvalu, you're a nation state with, you know, all the rights and, and sort of rights to self determination and rights to your own territory. That, that involves whether, you know, so people. For some it seems difficult to understand that that connection to place and that that sort of cultural, ancestral, spiritual, indigenous, you know, important links sort of override this practical, oh, we might as well just pack up and go sort of idea. But that's very much where it's coming from. So you know, the, these people are an independent, self determining, sovereign nation states and they have the rights to make their own decisions, you know, based on, you know, solid principles of international law.

[00:22:30.05] 

So and you know, all the international agreements that indigenous people have. Right, sorry, international rights, covenants and all that sort of thing that, you know, you have. So there's really quite, you know, a counter criticism that says, well, you know, external, external observers, especially since, you know, Pacific Islanders have contributed, contributed so little to the climate change problem that they're really, you know, this sort of idea that it's expensive for them to be able to stay where they are, you know, well, at the end of the day they have the rights to do so if they choose so if they choose to. So that's my, that's the counter, the counter argument.

[00:23:17.17] 

That's great. And that's probably where we should wrap things up. This is the Migration Policy Institute and I think we often think about migration as inevitable or I'd like the notion of immobility, not migrating as we often talk when we talk about immobility. Also there's a discussion about forced immobility. I like the notion, I think it's important to raise the notion of voluntary immobility and people staying in place for all the reasons you mentioned, because place is very important. But yeah, Carol, thank you so much. This was super. Helpful. I really enjoyed this talk.

[00:23:52.08] 

Thank you very much.

[00:23:55.17] 

Carol Farbotko is an adjunct research fellow at the University of the Sunshine coast and an adjunct researcher at the University of Tasmania. Her report for MPI is called New Approaches to Climate Change and Building the Adaptive Capacity of Mobile Populations. She's also working on a project on Transformative Mobilities in a Changing Climate, which you can be on the lookout for. The Pacific Islands play an outsized role in a lot of discussions about climate change. Because of the impacts of rising sea levels, communities on these islands are sometimes considered classic candidates for large scale migration or other adaptations. But as Carol explained, the situation is a lot more complicated than it often appears at first glance. That's been a recurring theme of this podcast, and it's one of the reasons I've been glad to be able to bring it to you. You can find other episodes of changing climate changing migration in our archives. Subscribe through your preferred app to make sure you get each and every episode, and please leave us a review if you can. We're also online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts and while you're on the website, you should check out Carol's report and the Migration Information Source's collection of articles on climate change and migration.

[00:25:21.03] 

Those are at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Yoseph Hamid and Kenia Guerrero produced this episode with special assistance from Julia Yanoff, Lisa Dixon, and Michelle Mittelstadt. Touch by Patrick Patrikios is our music. My name is Julian Hattem. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you next time.