A Warm Embrace in the Cold North? Climate Migration in Nordic Countries

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

CHAPTERS 

[00:02:04]: Arctic warming and differential impacts across communities 

[00:09:32]: Food systems, livelihoods, and climate impacts in Greenland 

[00:15:26]: Climate mitigation efforts and their effects on local and Indigenous communities 

[00:24:12]: Legal approaches to climate-related migration in Nordic countries 

[00:33:38]: Emerging economic activities in the Arctic and implications for mobility 

[00:40:48]: Research gaps and implications for climate preparedness in the region

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.17] 

Sweden, Norway and other countries in the Nordic region have historically had some of the most progressive policies on combating climate change and at times on welcoming refugees and other displaced people. Does that mean they're at the forefront of new protections and pathways for climate migrants? And how are local communities responding to the rapid warming of the Arctic, which is creating things like melting glaciers? From the Migration Policy Institute, this is Changing Climate, Changing Migration. This podcast is all about how climate change is reshaping human movement, featuring in depth conversations with top thinkers. My name is Julian Hattem, I'm your host and I'm the editor of MPI's online magazine called the Migration Information Source. Today we're going north: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, England, and Sweden. These might not be the poster children of climate migration, but they face a slew of unique challenges and questions. And given their historical position as leaders on issues around protection and climate change, their actions carry outsized weight. So what's happening up north and why might it matter for the rest of us? My guests today are the researchers Miriam Cullen and Matt Scott. They help lead a research group called the Nordic Network on Climate Related Displacement and Mobility and they're also the co editors of a brand new book called Nordic Approaches to Climate-Related Human Mobility.

[00:01:35.15] 

Miriam, Matt, thank you so much for coming on. I'm delighted to have you.

[00:01:38.22] 

Thanks for having us, Julian.

[00:01:40.14] 

Thank you. Nice to be here.

[00:01:42.00] 

So I'll be honest. The Nordic countries are not the first place I think of as being vulnerable to climate change. Typically the first places that come to mind are low lying island states, developing countries exposed to things like sea level rise or drought or hurricanes. Why should we focus on the Nordic region? What are the major climate impacts in this region and how does that spur or affect human migration and mobility?

[00:02:05.19] 

I can jump in on that. And I think the way to think about the initiative that we've been taking since the Nordic Network was established back in 2019 is to recognize that in this part of the world, the impacts of climate change are being felt. And by some people they're being felt quite acutely already, even if the scale of the impacts don't come anywhere near the impacts that we're seeing in other parts of the world, like Asia and the Pacific or in Africa. But these are phenomena like flood flooding, landslides, wildfires, and some probably distinctly Nordic phenomena such as glacial tsunamis. We have a colleague, Stef Matti, in in Iceland, who conducted some research on the phenomenon facing people living in the vicinity of the Svinafell Glacier, where there is an unknown time frame for when this glacier may collapse into a lake, generating a tsunami, which could have catastrophic impacts for the people living there. But there's also sea level rise, there's extreme heat which leads to melting sea ice, which has impacts on indigenous peoples. There's changes to the snow cover, so there's distinctive phenomena and then there's more familiar patterns like wildfires and floods.

[00:03:44.20] 

And the mobility dimensions, I think we see displacement in terms of people forced from their homes in the context of sudden onset processes, events as well as slower onset processes. We also see the beginnings of planned relocation initiatives or other ways of thinking about this, like managed realignment and things like that. So mobility is here, but it's under examined both at a policy and an academic level. And that's why we, we started this work.

[00:04:18.14] 

And I guess to be clarify, we're talking primarily about internal mobility. Right. And you mentioned planned relocation, which I want to talk about in a second. But what are the, have there been major government policies or community responses to some of these impacts of climate change and mobility? I guess, you know, what are the policy responses been to these situations?

[00:04:42.20] 

Yeah, it's interesting two points that you raise here. The question about is this internal and what are the policy responses? In a way, we see both internal displacement people moving within the borders of their own countries. We also see people moving from outside of the region, into the region, from other parts of the world. And maybe we'll talk about that a bit later, but the policy responses at the kind of international diplomatic level tend to be focused more on that how to address the movement of people across borders. When it comes to the movement of people within countries and within the Nordic region, we see a bit more of an ad hoc response. We see references in different policy documents. One of the chapters in the volume by our colleague Christina Daszkiewicz and others at the International Organization for Migration highlight a number of high level regional policy documents from the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Council of Baltic Sea States and others, which mention the possible need for people to move away from their homes and the need to focus on evacuation in the context of sudden onset hazard events. But there's not like you see in some other parts of the world, a bespoke legal or policy document or framework that sets out to address human mobility in the context of disasters and climate change.

[00:06:12.22] 

That's not there. And likewise at the national level, we don't see a national plan on internal displacement. We see some initiative and we mention in the book one process going on in Sweden. Looking at this managed realignment phenomenon of restructuring how settlements in coastal areas are designed. But it's not a national priority, it's not regional focus as such. And when, when it does get discussed at the international level, it tends to be focused more on people moving in a, well basically outside of the region. So the focus on international technical cooperation and finance to address the problem where it's most acute.

[00:07:01.12] 

I might just add to that. I think one of the things that we see here that is typical of sort of a sort of so called Global North approach to internal displacement is a real focus on the evacuation in the immediate aftermath of a particular hazard and much less focused on long term recovery. And what part of what this network sort of hopes to achieve is to look to the future a little. You know, we know that there is displacement occurring now, but we also know that many of these hazards that we're seeing are going to get worse. You know, they'll be more intense and more frequent, particularly in the Arctic. So, you know, we have Denmark is the, is the government for Greenland. You know, it's the state responsible for Greenland. And Greenland, the Arctic region is warming three times faster than the rest of the world. And so the impacts in the Arctic region are particularly severe, you know, in Greenland, in Norway and all of the states that have Arctic territories. And so the need to sort of focus on that area. We see so much focus on the Arctic in terms of climate mitigation, which is really important and ought to be done.

[00:08:16.24] 

But in climate adaptation we see less focus and yet we know that those effects are severe in that region. So I think too that also sort of justifies a focus here in the Nordic region, notwithstanding its relative wealth and that the harms felt by individuals because of that are certainly not the same as they are in the so called Global South. Yes, I'll leave it there. I had another point, but I seem to have slipped my mind.

[00:08:43.11] 

It'll come back to you. I think that that's an interesting important dynamic and I think the disconnect between what I assume is like far rural northern Greenland versus cities like Copenhagen, I assume that's a very big difference. Right. And Matt, you mentioned that certain people, certain types of communities are especially particularly vulnerable to some of the climate impacts in the Nordic region. Are we talking, who are those communities? Are we talking about indigenous people? I mean, and I know there is a global trend or it is typically true globally that indigenous people for a variety of reasons tend to be at the forefront of some of the kind of most extreme climate or tend to be more climate vulnerable because of their connection to place, marginalized political and geographic positions, I guess. Are those the kind of people we're talking about here or who is particularly vulnerable to these climate impacts?

[00:09:41.09] 

Yeah, I think I'll take this one. So there are two indigenous peoples, at least that we know, live in the European region. They live in the Nordic region. So we have Sámi and the Inuit who live in not just Greenland, they actually live across four states. They live across Denmark, Canada, the United States and Russia. Similarly, Sámi don't live in a single state. They live across four states also. And so these people are affected, their lives are affected more by climate change. You see the way snow is changing, impacting reindeer capacity to access food. In Greenland, the climate change is having significant impacts on daily life. Greenland I know more about because I was living there last year and it's a focus of my research. And what we know about Greenland is 80% of households in Greenland rely on wild or caught food for some portion of their diet. And that's, you know, if you can imagine living in a place that is mostly snow and ice, you know, and, you know, visually, there are no trees. You're not going to see fresh vegetables growing in the garden. The climate just doesn't permit those things.

[00:10:47.06] 

So if you want access to fresh fruit or vegetables, it's extremely difficult to come by. You're waiting on a ship to come up from Denmark. It takes a couple of weeks. That is not fresh food. So if you want fresh food, you need to go out and catch your own. And so it's a really normal part of metropolitan life that people have boats, they go out and catch fish or they go hunting for reindeer, for wild or caught food. And climate change is impacting that significantly. Insofar as, you know, Greenland is this vast expanse. You know, it's more than double the size of the Nordic other. The Nordic countries themselves. It's sort of between a third and a half the size of Australia. There's only 57,000 people living there on small communities and settlements around the coast. And the way you get around is not by road. You can't. There are no roads between towns. You need to go by boat or you need to fly or you need to use a snowmobile. And when you're out hunting, you're also using those same mechanisms, maybe sled dogs across ice, for instance. And when the ice is there for a shorter period and it's less reliable, you end up having people traveling longer distances to get less food over a shorter period of time.

[00:11:59.22] 

And so that's impacting health. Because what that means is that people become reliant instead if they can't get that fresh food on processed food, on food that can survive those long distances and be in the supermarket. That impacts not just the health of the body, but also mental health, the community of the sense that you get from going hunting and catching food and all those things. So these people are particularly sort of affected by climate change, but they also have been affected by the policies of a colonial past. And only not so long ago the IPCC recognized that colonial history is one of the indicators of vulnerability to climate change. And there's very good reasons for that. And already Greenlanders have been subject to forced relocation within living memory by an industrial, quickly industrializing state and had language and other things removed. And climate change is adding one more compounding factor to that experience of being dislocated from place. And so it's especially important, I think, that we think about how best to support initiatives that can help the positive growth of those places, rather than continue to see them hindered by impacts like climate change.

[00:13:20.23] 

If I can just jump in quickly on that, just to give a sense of the varieties of vulnerabilities in the region, it's absolutely right to focus on the indigenous context and the particular experience people belonging to those groups have. What we know from researching climate related mobility in other parts of the world is that in urban contexts you also have the differential exposure and vulnerability of persons with disabilities, older people, children, migrants and so on. And that's actually something that we don't get so much insight into in this volume. There's a massive need for further research. I was just looking recently at one of the major flood events in Sweden in 2021. There was once in 100 year, as they say, floods in Java. And the official report, you can search for evacuation there and the number of people evacuated is unknown. And that alone suggests the need to look much more closely at the experience of people who are forced from their homes in the context of these increasingly frequent and intense hazard events. Because that's the level of our understanding of some of these vulnerability characteristics. It's very limited, but we know that from the rest of the world these are the characteristics that contribute to higher levels of adversity among populations.

[00:14:53.23] 

Maybe one more thing if I might add. Sorry, now we're getting carried away with examples. But as the other side of this, so we're talking about the impacts of climate change itself causing displacement. And in the Greenlandic region, you might know about the landslide slide triggered tsunami that caused in evacuation, but subsequent protracted displacement of 170 people who years later are still unable to return to their homes. So planning is something that the region really needs to look at more closely. But the other side that I wanted to mention was how climate mitigation measures are also causing displacement and green energy initiatives and so forth are also causing forms of displacement, particularly for Sámi. But and so you'll see there's litigation in, in Norway in particular against windmills, you know, wind farms and some against rare earth element mining which is causing potential displacement. So there's a big mine also in Greenland that's currently going through investor state dispute settlement to which the locals object because of the potential of pollution and subsequent displacement that will affect them. But there's a lot of these kinds of things happening in the Nordic region. So on the one hand you have this very sort of tech innovators, you know, this Nordic region that's so known for being on the front foot of climate mitigation and of technology and of all these, all these sort of positive things that we think about when we're trying to engage in protecting the planet from climate related harms.

[00:16:26.24] 

But there are consequences to doing that. And obviously those policies need to be implemented thoughtfully when engaging in them can have an impact on the indigenous population nearby. And in fact there, there's a document that came out from the Inuit Circumpolar Council and others, which was an Arctic indigenous peoples forum that happened last year where one of the concerns that they emphasized was a concern about green colonialism. The idea that this is so important, this is so important that your rights to free prior and informed consent aren't relevant because we need to engage in these climate mitigation measures. And of course you understand the desire to really make sure that we have effective climate mitigation measures. But there's a deep concern among Sámi and Inuit that their rights may once again be pushed to the side.

[00:17:21.03] 

That's a great example. That's a fascinating and tragic, I guess, paradox of the current moment. I want to pivot slightly to some of the planning stuff you mentioned. I think, Matt, you talked about this notion of plan managed realignment. What is that? How does that differ from managed retreat and is, I assume it's some sort of like planned relocation of how and where people live? I mean, is that being done in a way that is conscious of some of these concerns that Miriam just mentioned and some of the deeper seated vulnerabilities and inequities amongst climate vulnerable communities?

[00:17:56.16] 

Yeah, it's a great question. The question, if I'm thinking about what we've seen in a Swedish context, is still very much up for discussion. So one of the workshops that we had as part of this Nordic network involved participation of researchers from the, well, from multiple Swedish research institutes interacting with local authorities. And they were discussing this question of managed retreat. And quickly, I think recognized the difficult language and the associations that that brings up and how it creates this sort of negative political climate that suggests failure. And so into that mix comes the concept of managed realignment, which has maybe also a longer time frame to it. So it's not so much like we see in other parts of the region or also other parts of the world where there's kind of imminent hazard or recurrent hazards that make places uninhabitable in the near term. It's more as Sweden and other parts of the region recognize the potential implications of rising sea levels and associated other hazards. There's a need to redesign cities over a decadal kind of perspective so that we're no longer. It's like a zoning kind of approach, so we're no longer planning to have settlements on the coastline, but instead we'll generate sort of open spaces there.

[00:19:37.24] 

But the insight that came from that process, it was called, I can't remember the full name, but it's CAMEL, C-A-M-E-L. And then there was a knock on project called KOALA. So they were pretty good at coming up with animal names to help you remember. And the MEL relates to Managed Realignment. So you can find that if you're, if you're curious. But one of the insights was that notwithstanding the anticipation coming from geological survey and IPCC reports and domestic climate reports that these hazards were increasing, we could expect rising sea levels and so on. There is a lack of willingness on the part of local authorities to be guided by that risk assessment because of things like the added revenue that comes from building in scenic locations. So the kind of and other insights that come out of that context is that the buck stops with the consumer in some of these situations. So you find these individuals who purchase housing and maybe in 30 years down the line they're uninhabitable and the responsibility lies with them or with the insurance. But maybe the insurance is pulled out. So the kind of social justice implications are kind of significant in that context.

[00:21:01.24] 

But we haven't seen it so much yet. So there's again going back to how we started, not so much of a coherent government policy or strategy on planned relocation or managed realignment on a national level. But then we also do have examples of context specific discussions around specific hazards. So I mentioned that Svinafell Glacier in Iceland and there there's an ongoing discussion about do we need to move people out of the way and when and how and what does that look like? So there's, there's good research on those specific contexts, but there's not a kind of coherent national level policy framework to, to talk about those kind of movements.

[00:21:52.08] 

If I might add to that, I think bringing up Steph's research is really good. Steph and I actually wrote an article about that particular instance. And also I'm thinking about Mo Hamza, Reidar Satupe-Delgado and Kerstin Eriksson have a chapter in the book about three different case studies. We're in sort of at least two of them. Even though there's an inevitable hazard of significance that will occur, nobody wants to move, nobody's planning to go anywhere. And so I think partly there's just not a political impetus right now. I think until we see that massive sort of disaster happen where something that was foreseeable but wasn't planned for occurs and forces people to move, we're not really going to see that it's beginning to occur. Last year there were some. As you might know, Denmark is an incredibly flat country. I think the Highest elevation is 180 meters, so really low countries. So sea level rise is a particular issue here. And there were several instances last year where storm surges caused complete loss of property along the coast. And I think slowly homeowners are starting to say, hold on a second, this is something really concerning.

[00:23:02.20] 

And as we see those hazards appear more frequently and more intensely and we see that coastal erosion occurring with greater and greater intensity, I think we're going to start to see a desire on the part of the voting public to have something done and that might shift these policies. And having the Nordic network in place, producing this research, identifying the research gaps, we really hope is going to contribute to those discussions and be able to contribute to the policy agenda moving forward. Because I think it is an inevitability that, you know, eventually there's going to have to be a sort of principled program in place. While each instance might need, you know, a very specific approach, you can do that based on a set of, you know, human rights based principles to guide you, which, you know, Matthew is in particular a great expert at.

[00:23:50.04] 

I want to talk about several other things. I want to move along, I guess, but I'm curious about international movement from other parts of the world into the Nordic regions. Matthew, you mentioned there is a bit more policy attention or policy focus on this development or this trend. Is there this movement underway? A B I mean, what are the policy responses? My understanding is Finland and Sweden had some sort of humanitarian protection, protection law at some sort, at some point, but no longer. What happened?

[00:24:25.05] 

Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. Thanks. There's a couple of chapters in the volume that touch upon some of the different parts of the question. So maybe I'll start with the work by Sarah Nash, who wrote a chapter in the volume based on her research on Sweden and Denmark. And there she, she found something curious, interesting, a kind of absolute prioritization of the international technical cooperation dimension of addressing what we might call the root causes of displacement. So there's very much this root causes narrative. And specifically Denmark expressly addresses this in its development policy. So recognizing climate as a driver of cross border. They even specifically address irregular migration. The policy objective is to contribute to disaster risk reduction, climate change, adaptation at home so that people don't then engage in cross border and in particular irregular migration to Europe and in this context, Denmark. And we see that also happening in a Swedish context now as well. So. And at the same time, what she shows in the research is that when talking to immigration ministers, they say, well, my, my perspective on climate change and migration is what they're saying in the Development Ministry.

[00:25:59.03] 

So there's not at all, I think, a conscious policy initiative to address movement of people into the Nordic region and the specific countries in the context of disasters and climate change. And that mirrors what we see at the European level as well. There's a staff working document from 2013 that was revisited something like 2018 or 19 that puts basically the entire focus of policy initiatives on the external dimension. Not, not really at all. How will Europe respond to this phenomenon? And so pivoting to the second part of your question, is this happening and how about the Swedish and Finnish responses? We did some research that's also reflected in this volume into specific judicial decisions in Swedish context. Relying on one of those innovative provisions that you referenced. Both Sweden and Finland introduced specific legal provisions within their immigration frameworks. Immigration legal frameworks, the Immigration act that extended a form of international protection, not refugee status, but subsidiary form of protection to people who could not go back home in the context of disasters. And this happened in the 1990s in both countries. And we see reference encouraging or kind of celebrating this policy innovation or the legal innovation of both of these countries, including at the European Union level, where there was an encouragement to study the practice in these two countries to see if it could be a guideline for other countries to adopt.

[00:27:56.13] 

Fast forward to 2022 or 2021. We see both countries revoke. It was 2021 for Sweden and 2016 actually for Finland. Both countries revoking these policies, saying for the most part they didn't really get used that much anyway. So that was kind of interesting. But we wanted to go a bit further and look at whether that was actually the case. And looking specifically at the Swedish context, you could conclude that they didn't get used that much, these legal provisions. But it's not the same as saying they didn't get used at all. So we found about 200 cases where individuals from all over the world, I mean there was even a New Zealand case, but also Japan, also a lot of people from the Balkan countries, Philippines, Haiti, about 30 countries if memory serves, Nepal, Pakistan, where people expressly sought to rely on these provisions and then didn't get anywhere. And that's we struggled a little bit with, in understanding the judicial response to these applications. There wasn't a lot of reasoning behind why those provisions didn't apply. And we concluded that that's probably something specific to Nordic judicial culture. And there's research on that. But I think the most interesting takeaway is, okay, these policies, maybe they didn't go in the direction that external observers might have expected.

[00:29:28.03] 

But what's significant is the finding that people did come to Nordic countries and sought international protection in this context. That means that this is no longer a speculative phenomenon. I mean, I wrote articles back in 2014 and had to make up scenarios because they hadn't happened yet. So there was all of this sort of thinking about what might it look like. We have a lot of empirical information on what it looks like, but we don't have the same kind of policy level engagement with it. And so what we call for in that article is something similar to processes that happened in other parts of the world. Trying to have a kind of dialog between academics and policymakers and civil society and representatives of migrants themselves to understand what might be a coherent rights based, yet somehow politically feasible response to a phenomenon that is absolutely already here.

[00:30:28.24] 

We're getting short on time, but there's two kind of follow up questions I want to have to that one is we mentioned before that the Nordic region is known as being globally very out front, environmentally conscious, at the forefront of environmental sustainability. It's also historically at the forefront of some international legal humanitarian efforts. Would we Say that's the case as it relates to climate displacement, climate mobility. And how does this experiment in Finland and Sweden fit into that mix?

[00:31:02.03] 

Yeah, I think it fit into the mix back in the day, and since 2015, 2016, the mix has shifted. And another chapter in the volume talks about that in depth. Looking at what's happened with the Nordic norm entrepreneurs, where there is this history of seeking to influence developments at the international level in a. In a direction that reflects international humanitarian and human rights standards. But that has decidedly changed. And the author of that chapter, Anne Massari-Vaudé, traces that in numerous countries. Denmark, Sweden in particular, and Finland also is covered there. And it's a shift. So she has an interesting academic engagement with the concept of norm entrepreneurship, suggesting it doesn't always have to be in the direction of humanitarianism and human rights. The norms could shift to what might be the more in favor of a deterrence paradigm. And that, I think we see, the less welcoming norm entrepreneurship is something that is in the ascendancy here, hence the revocation of those policies as well.

[00:32:18.12] 

I think too, what's implicit in her chapter, and to some degree Sarah's and in some other scholarship that's sort of arising at the moment is this sort of another sort of paradox in which Nordic countries remain sort of the moral champion norm entrepreneurs, when they're looking outward. So when they're sort of engaging in the development policies or sending money abroad or whatever else, it's very much about human rights and about protection and these kinds of things. But the borders up are on the. On the reverse side. So she sort of says, you know, they are engaging in innovations and norm entrepreneurship. But it's not so much that sort of the shaping of global moral conditions that it once was, at least when we come to the internal considerations, you know, to the acceptance of asylum seekers to innovations in inward migration policy. No, but are they still. When you hear, you know, any of the Nordic states speaking at the UN Human Rights Council or speaking, you know, in this kind of context, then they will sound like the absolute champions of human rights. And so I think it's this double standard that exists where there's an outward, this is what you all should do kind of classic approach, and inwardly are increasingly conservative when it comes to protecting rights of people on this territory.

[00:33:43.09] 

We're basically out of time. But just one final thing that's curious to me, I'm going to raise and throw out there for you is, I guess, kind of a flipped script or a different way to think about climate mobility interaction, which Is that instead of people moving, climate vulnerability, climate impacts, forcing people to move away from a region, climate change, especially receding sea ice, melting of glaciers, making some places more accessible, I mean, is that also a trend? Whether that opens up opportunities, for better or for worse, for mining, for energy projects, to facilitate shipping or tourism? I mean, cruise ships, is that a dynamic that's also happening? And is that another wrinkle to this, to the story?

[00:34:32.23] 

It's certainly a discussion that's happening. Whether we're really seeing that yet is another question. So there's obviously the melting of the sea ice is opening up shipping passages and the potential for cruise ships and other forms of transport through the Arctic in ways that they, that did not used to be possible. Also, you know, certain parts of the Arctic are very inaccessible. And as the, as the ice melts, as the polar ice cap melts, then new resources, new rare earth elements potentially become available. And so there are very big discussions at the moment on rare earth elements mining in Greenland, on the potential, you know, almost. What's the word? I can't think of the right word. But you know, almost appallingly that the melted ice itself might give opportunity for energy generation through hydro and so forth. So these are big discussions and it's an issue in terms of the protection of rights for people. I think in Greenland when we're talking about there's a housing crisis. A while ago I published some work on human rights in Greenland that found that the waiting list for public housing in Greenland is up to 17 years in the capital in new.

[00:35:49.08] 

And yet there's a lot of new building going on for sort of middle and high income people which will like be, you know, some, there will be some jobs going to locals, but it will likely be people coming in, people working there seasonally and the fly in, fly out of researchers, of doctors and medical staff and so forth is already a problem. There's also things like as we have a growing population of people coming in, how that's going to impact things like the health system and so forth. So it's a lot of pressure, also a lot of potential for pollution, which is rather paradoxical and something that is both being embraced as a potential for development, the potential for future independence from Greenland and its own, you know, through its own economy and also deeply concerning in terms of the environment itself. Will that lead to displacement? Not sure. It's certainly leading to, you know, concerns about where are we focusing, you know, housing availability and so forth. And one of the big problems for the relocation of the 170 residents after the tsunami in the fjord in Greenland was that there was the relocation housing didn't have minimum building standards.

[00:36:54.18] 

So you know, in a place that's Arctic, we need things like sewerage to be available and so forth. And that's not that common. Not. I mean it's commonplace in the capital cities, but in more remote areas in quick builds you may not have sewerage or running water, those kinds of things available. And that needs to be planned for too. Also, if we're talking about tourists, the Arctic's a dangerous kind of place. So we also need to think about how we cope with housing and protecting them too, when locals themselves are living in housing that maybe is below the kind of building standards with basic sort of wash elements included that we would expect. So that's very briefly, there are many, many concerns about the opening up of these passages beyond this too. But in terms of relocation, we're probably looking at housing pressures being one of the biggest issues.

[00:37:42.06] 

Fascinating stuff, but we should probably wrap things up there. We're a bit over time already. Thank you two so much for coming on. This was a super interesting conversation to have. I learned a lot. I appreciate you taking the time.

[00:37:52.12] 

Thank you for inviting me.

[00:37:53.09] 

Thanks for having us.

[00:37:54.16] 

Miriam Cullen and Matthew Scott are the co editors of Nordic Approaches to Climate Related Human Mobility, which will soon be open access, if it's not already by the time this episode comes out. Miriam is the Associate professor at the University of Copenhagen's center for Comparative European and Constitutional Legal Studies and a Program Manager at the Danish Institute for Human Rights in Copenhagen. And Matt is a senior researcher and leader of the Human Rights and the Environment Thematic Area of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and an Associate professor and an adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Lund University in Sweden. Thanks for listening to this episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Make sure you're subscribing to the podcast to catch all of our new episodes as soon as they're released. We're on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and YouTube and all the other major podcast services. If you missed an episode, you can find all of our conversations online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. If you liked this conversation with Miriam and Matt, you might appreciate my recent channel chat with the legal scholar Jane McAdam about climate migration pathways in the Pacific Islands, or my conversation with  Caroline Zickgraf digging into the nuances of so called trapped populations who can't move and subscribe to MPI's other podcasts including World of Migration for probing conversations about issues affecting refugees and other migrants worldwide.

[00:39:29.14] 

Stay on top of everything coming out of MPI by subscribing subscribing to the Migration Information Source Newsletter. It's absolutely free and comes out twice per month, featuring accessible insights and analysis on cutting edge migration issues worldwide. You can sign up at migrationpolicy.org/signup. This episode of the podcast was produced by Daniella Espacio with assistance from Lisa Dixon and editorial oversight from Michelle Mittelstadt. Our theme music is Touched by Patrick Patrikios. I'm Julian Hattem. I'll see you next time.