Small Islands, Big Challenges: Climate Change and Migration in the Caribbean

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CHAPTERS 

[00:01:53]: Historical and contemporary migration patterns in the Caribbean 

[00:05:25]: Sea-level rise, storms, and implications for displacement 

[00:14:16]: Comparing policy approaches in the Caribbean and Pacific regions 

[00:16:44]: Temporary Protected Status and limits of disaster-related protection 

[00:17:44]: Constraints on mobility and immobile populations 

[00:19:06]: Economic implications of climate change for tourism-dependent economies

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:07.11] 

There are few places in the world that are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than the Caribbean. Hurricanes are a constant presence and at times can displace millions of people. Because the island nations tend to be small, there are often not many places for people to flee. So where did they go? This is Changing Climate, Changing Migration. It's a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that explores how climate change is altering human migration. I am your host, Julian Hattem. I am also the editor of MPI's online magazine called the Migration Information Source, which is available at migrationinformation.org. My guest today is Natalie Dietrich Jones. Natalie is a senior research fellow at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where she focuses on migration, displacement and border issues. I'm thrilled to have her on today to help me make sense of the climate migration trends and policies in the Caribbean. Natalie, thank you so much for your time.

[00:01:08.03] 

Welcome on thank you Julian. It's a pleasure to be here. And this is a topic that's really important to me and that's gaining more relevance in international policy space. So I'm happy to be here to discuss.

[00:01:23.20] 

Very happy to have you. I guess I want to start with laying out some of the main mobility and climate mobility trends in the region. A lot of our listeners might be under the impression that the Caribbean is largely a place where migrants move away from to go to, for instance, the mainland Americas. Is that always the case? Generally speaking, what are the major patterns for migration in the Caribbean both within and into and out of the Caribbean? And how is climate change exacerbating or altering that movement?

[00:01:53.14] 

The region is known for its migratory culture and historically since the post emancipation period, so once slavery ended and people had the ability to move, people started moving to different places in the world. And traditionally Caribbean people have moved to three primary destinations. So you did mention the Americas, so the United States and Canada. But in the 60s and 70s a lot of persons would have left to go, well, 50s, 60s and 70s to go to the United Kingdom and they're traditionally known as the Windrush generation. All persons continue to migrate to those three countries because of social capital and established networks. We've seen that persons also move within the region, which is also a pattern that emerged within during the post emancipation period. So a lot of persons would have gone to Latin America to help to construct railways, to construct the Panama Canal. But in our contemporary period we're seeing some changes. So persons going to Asia, for example, so Dubai, China, some persons to Japan and Korea based on some exchange Programs that exist with those countries. We are not yet sure how climate change is adjusting the patterns. So the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that climate change can either increase, decrease or make do adjustments to flows.

[00:03:41.27] 

It's not clear what exactly the change will be. It depends on several contextual factors. US so in the Caribbean, because of the lack of data, we're not yet sure, especially for slow onset climate change, exactly how mobility patterns are shifting. Anecdotally, we know that people might be moving more internally from rural to urban areas. And with Irma we did see some intra regional movements when Dominica and Barbuda would have been impacted. So moving from one island to the next.

[00:04:21.20] 

This was Hurricane Irma a couple of years ago, right?

[00:04:24.08] 

Yeah, right. Still we need some data to be able to definitively say the degree to which climate change has been altering mobility patterns.

[00:04:34.26] 

To be clear, the Caribbean is known as a particularly vulnerable area to the reasons of climate change. Right. I mean, can you, can you talk about that? Generally speaking and also within the region, are there certain countries that are believed to be more vulnerable or more impacted by climate change events than others? Both fast onset like hurricanes and slow onset like sea level rise.

[00:04:55.19] 

So the Caribbean is composed of a group of states that's referred to as small island developing states. It's a United nations designation that basically has grouped the states based on these vulnerabilities that you mentioned in not just environmental but also social and political vulnerabilities. So climate change kind of connects all of those categories, but especially would have more meaning for environmental vulnerability. So Caribbean small island developing states face several challenges within the context of climate change. So many of our islands have commercial and residential activity concentrated along the coast, in some cases as high as 70%. And that means that if sea level rises, then those communities eventually may be displaced. More activity having to be disrupted due to the increased intensity of high hydrometry hydrometeorological events. If there is salt water intrusion, for example, agricultural lands are affected. And so eventually persons might be moving away from those agricultural lands, possibly to urban areas or maybe even to other countries. So what climate change is doing is impacting on vulnerable communities, communities that may not have alternative places or spaces to move to. That's in the long term. And then in terms of the immediate and more near term with the increased intensity of storms and weather events.

[00:06:42.15] 

So the hurricanes that we mentioned earlier, the region however, is a multi hazard region. So it's not just the floods and hurricanes and landslides. We, we have countries that have Land based and underwater volcanoes, we're on fault lines. So if you think about Haiti for example, and the 2010 earthquake and then I think in 2015 as well. So multi hazard region climate change is making things even more complicated for vulnerable communities. And like the Caribbean, the Pacific also shares these vulnerabilities. But there is some distinctiveness in terms of the topography of the islands, in terms of some being atolls and some not being atolls or dates being archipelagic. And then that creates some additional issues in terms of mobility between islands and even access to resources.

[00:07:38.29] 

Can you expand on that a little bit more? You mean in the Caribbean, what's distinct?

[00:07:43.01] 

In the Caribbean and the Pacific. But if we take the Caribbean and the case of the Bahamas, when Dorian hit in 2019, it kind of highlighted those disparities between them. And the islands that were more impacted had less access to state resources. This is something that Adele Thomas talks about in her work. So non economic losses due to climate change being exacerbated due to the archaeologic nature of islands and then even persons ability to evacuate being impacted by transportation issues between islands and so on.

[00:08:27.04] 

And I want to talk about policy measures then too. I mean you talk about some of the, at least in the Bahamas, some of the responses after, after hurricane strike. Generally speaking, I know that my impression is that the Caribbean has been somewhat of a leader in kind of free movement regimes, both in the kind of the smaller organization of Eastern Caribbean States which has a dozen or so members, and, and in the larger Caribbean Community Organization, also known as CARICOM. I guess what, I mean, what options are there for what is the policy environment to allow or prohibit movement between countries? Much less than internationally, because I know that.

[00:09:02.25] 

Yeah, yeah. So this is where my work on climate change centers in terms of how states can facilitate human mobility within the context of climate change and disasters. So yes, there are free movement regimes that allow for citizens within CARICOM. So the Caribbean Community and then the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States to move between islands. So there is some flexibility, but these are ad hoc mechanisms. There is no policy regime that says okay, if there is a disaster hitting persons can move to these islands and stay for X period. So, so it's really what obtains generally for these free movement regimes. So in the case of CARICOM, for example, persons who are not designated as skilled nationals have up to six months stay in the Caricom countries. And in the OECs is indefinite entry. Even without your passport, you can move within the OECs, unlike your driver's license, any type of identification. So what's been suggested is that the OECS is a bit more advanced than CARICOM, but as I said, in both cases it's an ad hoc mechanism. And the work that the International Organization for Migration, for example, has been doing has been about trying to formalize something that could specifically address human mobility in the context of climate change.

[00:10:36.26] 

So there's a project ongoing now, I've actually been working on that to assess countries responsiveness within the human security framework. And what we see is that. So immigration acts are kind of dated that don't acknowledge climate change as a driver of mobility. However, there are some legislation that address vulnerable group, so the aged, disabled or persons living with disability, women, youth, that could be adapted to climate change disaster scenarios. I think I've answered, I think, yeah,

[00:11:16.03] 

no, that's great, that's super helpful. I mean, so it seems like there is this kind of skeletal framework for free movement, but somewhat limited and not necessarily designed with climate change or the impacts of environmental change in mind, but could be right. It seems like you're, you know, there's some, there's the, the building blocks of

[00:11:33.12] 

maybe just add up. The work is ongoing and the OECS did issue a ministerial declaration at cop. I'm trying to remember which copy it was. But so there is this declaration that acknowledges the link between climate change and human mobility. And so we could consider that as a best practice of sorts. But it is a declaration, it is not a population policy initiative. And so we need to move beyond statements to more concrete policy actions.

[00:12:03.18] 

I, you, you mentioned Adelle Thomas who has been on our podcast before and shameless self promotion listeners should go listen to that podcast. She talks about loss and damage. But we also talked to Jane McAdam in Australia and I wanted to further this comparison between the Caribbean and the Pacific small island states because one of the things that Jane McAdam and I talked about was the. Some of the policy movers or experiments in the Pacific small Pacific islands countries which as you note face some of the same situations as the Caribbean. Those are much more structured or the, some of the maneuvers have included policies structured around the idea of moving people from small island states like Tuvalu and Kiribati to larger metropoles or the bigger countries of Australia, New Zealand, higher income, geographically larger as well. But that's not the case in the Caribbean. Right? I mean none of these, there are no proposals to for instance, allow free movement for some number of climate affected people from the Caribbean to the US or Canada or the UK or even Colombia, Mexico. Right?

[00:13:06.10] 

I mean, these are primarily the building blocks, are primarily intra Caribbean mobility. Or is that incorrect?

[00:13:12.16] 

You are correct. Well, maybe just to say that the formalized regimes that allow for mobility with the US are labor mobility regimes that focus on. And I know that there is a discussion around how that might be connected to climate change because, for example, farmers may be able to adopt practices they've seen overseas to kind of address any climate change issues that arise in their own communities, or they may use this migration as an adaptation strategy to try to, to account for livelihoods that may be impacted by climate change. But it's not necessarily that, oh, we've designed this for climate change. This is something that's existed since even in some cases before independence in the islands. And it's really about filling labor needs in the US And Canada primarily. The UK recently started with Barbados, for example. So, so unlike the Pacific, we don't have these formalized regimes that kind of address climate change issues. We have, however, benefited from temporary protected status within disaster context. So the Montserrat, for example, when there was a volcanic eruption that basically destroyed about half of the island, Haiti with the earthquake. And then there are other Latin American countries that have benefited from their citizens, have benefited from TPS.

[00:14:47.25] 

But we know that TPS is just a. It's temporary. So.

[00:14:51.03] 

Yeah. Just for listeners who are not familiar, Temporary Protected Status is a, as the name describes it, temporary status in the US given to people already in the US to present, prevent, return to, to

[00:15:02.03] 

disaster or conflict affected areas so they can stay as long as the order for temporary protected status is in effect and it allows them to work while they reside in the United States. So we don't have this. I'm not sure that it would ever. I mean, maybe we would have to wait 100 years to see, to see if the US would respond in that way to the region. But at the moment there is nothing, nothing in place.

[00:15:35.11] 

Probably also worth noting that the Trump administration has taken moves to limit TPS, both revoke TPS status and not extend it in, in other cases. I'm not sure if it's right, but this is.

[00:15:44.21] 

So this is also tied to, I guess, broader conversations around whether climate refugees are a real thing. Sure.

[00:15:51.01] 

Yeah.

[00:15:51.15] 

In terms of global conversations about whether we need to expand the categories for protection within the context of the 1951 Refugee Convention. So it's connected to that broader discourse. And Mia Motley, I think two COPs ago had highlighted the fact that we are likely to see More people moving not just from the Caribbean, but climate change will cause more displacement. And so do we need to think through how we will respond to these regions. So there is, within the context of the Global Compact, an objective that says states should try to address the drivers of migration, which includes climate change and disasters. But this is a non binding agreement. We are still waiting to see how concretely states will be addressing the drivers in the sending countries.

[00:16:47.26] 

Another interesting wrinkle in this in the Caribbean in particular, is that some Caribbean countries are actually dependencies or overseas territories of non European the US or some countries in Europe. For instance, the US Virgin Islands, as the name implies, is a territory of the US, The British Virgin Islands a territory of Britain. Also France has the regions of Guadalupe and Martinique, Aruba, Curacao or Curacao, technically part of the Netherlands, just to name a couple examples. Also, I believe Colombia and Venezuela have island territories that sit solidly in the Caribbean. Does that impact this situation, this dynamic at all?

[00:17:24.02] 

Throw that in the mix.

[00:17:24.29] 

What happened?

[00:17:25.13] 

Trying to be positive. Positive and say that for persons that reside in these territories that are impacted would have the possibility to move to these metropole states. Side with Puerto Rico, I believe.

[00:17:39.17] 

Yes. Yeah.

[00:17:40.25] 

With persons leaving Puerto Rico to go to the US but not everybody can move or wants to move. And so the other side of the coin is for voluntary and involuntary involuntarily immobile populations. How. How does the state respond to those persons? A lot of communities have social and cultural ties to their lands. And this is a big issue, especially in the Pacific region. Without. So going back to the conversation we had earlier about policy in the Caribbean, there are few countries that have relocation strategies in place. So if we didn't need to move communities, how would we go about that? So, and then how would we address the needs of these voluntarily immobile populations,

[00:18:30.21] 

people who don't want to live here?

[00:18:32.05] 

I know for Jamaica, which is where I live, it came up, it has come up in the past. And one community was relocated, but it wasn't. It was very tense in terms of trying to get them to relocate from Caribbean tourists, which was impacted significantly. I think it was by Ivan. Yeah. These are conversations that we urgently need to have in order to respond to these community vulnerabilities.

[00:18:57.11] 

This is really fascinating and I guess we're almost out of time, but I guess I wanted to finish on to pivot to one other type of mobility that I wanted to discuss, which is tourism. The Caribbean is everything else. I mean, also one of the most tourism dependent regions in the World, perhaps the single most tourism dependent regions of the world. And some places, places I think in like Antigua and Barbuda, something like half of the economy, half of our jobs come from tourism. But tourism also is dependent on nice weather. People don't want to go to a place in the midst of a hurricane. What kind of vulnerabilities does the region as a whole have? Economic vulnerabilities. On top of other vulnerabilities from climate change and the potential of reduced mobility inwards mobility, reduced tourism, that's another challenge too, right?

[00:19:43.03] 

Yeah. So a lot of the hotels, so the. And the tourist attractions are located along the coast. So there is this threat to our sustainability and our economic development. Should climate change result in disruption of tourist tourism activity? I'm not sure the degree to which the governments have been disrupted discussing this. I know in the State of the Caribbean Climate Report it's one of the things that is mentioned, the fact that a lot of commercial activity, not just tourism, but medical facilities, airports, the airports where persons would need to land in order to drive somewhere to go to a hotel. So climate change definitely will have an impact on our economic development. We saw it with COVID and the extent of COVID's reach when our ports were closed. I think because it's so far away, we're trying not to think too much about it. But if we're proactive with our planning, and I know some countries have been thinking about it, so Barbados, for example, they have set back regulations in their law. So businesses and residents that want to build along the coast, they have to do it by a certain distance away from the sea.

[00:21:05.17] 

But then the question is, is this enforced course the degree to which persons actually observe the regulations? But it is there in their physical planning strategies. But we need to have more conversations about this in terms of our future and our security and our very existence.

[00:21:27.06] 

That's a stirring and note to leave it on. I guess we have to bring the conversation to an end there. But Natalie, thank you so much for your time. This was a really interesting conversation and I really appreciate you taking the time to come speak with us today.

[00:21:39.25] 

Yeah. And I'm grateful to be here and, and I am happy to receive any questions from persons have listened to the podcast on this issue.

[00:21:48.10] 

Is there, do you have a social media account or something where people can follow you?

[00:21:51.19] 

I'm one of the few still on X at @NDietrichJones N D I E T R I C H J O N E S. I do have a LinkedIn page so you can send me a message, but it might be a while before I answer. And of course, email [email protected].

[00:22:15.26] 

Natalie Dietrich Jones is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of the West Indies, Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies. She previously was employed with the Office of the UN Resident Coordinator for Barbados and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States thank you for tuning in to this episode of Changing Climate Changing Migration. Please subscribe to the podcast to stay on top of all of the episodes that we release. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and any place else you get your podcasts. Check out our archives on MPI's website at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. In my conversation with Natalie, I mentioned a prior episode with Adelle Thomas about the idea of loss and damage, and with Jane McAdam on the legal experiment in the Pacific, which may be a model for the world. You can find those episodes on our site. MPI has a wide range of research about climate migration, which you can access at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Through our site, you can also subscribe to the Migration Information Source newsletter to stay on top of all the major migration trends and and policies, and make sure to follow us on your social media platform of choice.

[00:23:24.22] 

This episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration was produced by Elizabeth Navarro, with editorial oversight from Michelle Mittelstadt and additional assistance from Lisa Dixon. The theme music you're hearing is called Touch by Patrick Patrikios. I'm Julian Hattem. Thank you for listening. I'll see you soon.