The lasted World bank’s Groundswell report highlights that by 2050 – without concrete climate and development action – climate change could lead more than 216 million people in 6 regions to migrate within their own countries.

If climate change is now an increasingly potent driver of migration there is still a difficulty in isolating the environmental factors, but no one seems to deny the importance of these as a reason for people being displaced. The newest figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reveal that over 70% of the 33 million newly displaced people (2019) had climate-related triggers.

Climate change has the potential to trigger major social transformations, potentially involving abrupt increases in climate damages, even under smooth climate change. Climate-induced displacement or migration has become one of the most visible manifestations of the relationship between ecological and societal breakdown yet our understanding of how climate change and social processes interact to produce migration, and the outcomes and impacts of these movements remain limited. The role of climate change in population displacement is not a linear relationship of cause and effect, of environmental “push” and economic “pull”. Climate change exacerbates existing environmental, economic, and social vulnerabilities.

However, there has been a collective, and rather successful, attempt to ignore the scale of the problem. We can no longer be satisfied with urging national disaster adaptation or policy approach focused on preventing migration. There is a need to go far beyond the management of migrating populations. These relate to issues such as climate change adaptation, urban planning, developmental assistance, and conflict management.

This team is meant to act as a multi-disciplinary knowledge and networking group for emergent discourses in climate change and migration.

Individuals, civil society members, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are invited to contribute.

Feed into this e-team your data and expertise on all aspects, including (but not limited to):

• Interlinkages between climate change and migration
• Drivers for migration
• Prediction/scenarios on migration trends
• Data on internal/external migration and its links to climate change natural hazards
• Legal and policy challenges and responses to environmentally induced migration
• Protection gaps for those displaced by environmental change
• How to respond to future movements of populations: role of cities and urban planning
• Evidence on how migration built resilience/ adaptation strategies
• Gendered vulnerability to disasters and climate risk
• Sharing best practices, effective policies
• Policy recommendations