Where Are All the Climate Migrants? Explaining Immobility amid ... - ReliefWeb

Where Are All the Climate Migrants? Explaining Immobility amid Environmental Change - World | ReliefWeb

Millions of people migrate each year because of the impacts of climate change and other extreme environmental events. While people can and do cross international borders, typically this movement is within their own country. In 2022 alone, disasters drove some 32.6 million recorded internal displacements—the highest figure in more than a decade. This includes people forced to flee floods, monsoons, and other shock events; an additional unknown number moved in response to gradually deteriorating environmental conditions such as sea-level rise, coastal erosion, extreme heat, and climatic variability.

Yet, as worrying as these statistics are, the vast majority of people living in places highly vulnerable to climate change do not migrate. If migration or displacement was the inevitable response to environmental change, the world would be in the midst of a much more dramatic upheaval. The fact that it is not could be interpreted as a good thing, since being settled is often seen as normal and even desirable and, therefore, unproblematic.

However, the reality is both more complicated and more concerning. Catastrophic predictions that climate change will create huge numbers of desperate migrants ignores that the relationship between migration and climate change is non-linear. Its impacts are not distributed evenly nor responded to equally. Some individuals can adapt in place, while many people do not have the capability to move, and others might be able to but are reluctant to leave homelands to which they feel irrevocably bound. When migration is not a viable option, people who are unable or unwilling to move may be the ones most negatively affected by climate change, as they become trapped in increasingly uninhabitable locations.