‘Environmental migrants’ present entrepreneurial opportunities
26th June 2009
Simon Harding
Wealthy countries are wrong to fear a mass influx of ‘environmental migrants’ from developing countries, according to a report by the London based think-tank, the Institute for Environment and Development (IED). People uprooted by climate change in the developing world will move short distances to local towns and regional capitals in search of temporary work, rather than embark on permanent migration to the EU and US. Short distance, short term movement will characterise environmentally driven migration in the future, the IED claims.
The IED’s Cecilia Tacoli is upbeat: ‘No one seems to have the perception that migration is an essential part of people’s lives’, she told Reuters, ‘for some people it is an extremely good strategy to move to better jobs and better life styles’.
Most governments in both the developed and developing worlds see migration as a problem and as a result tend to bias their strategies to limit it. Economic growth in one country, it is argued, will stop people from moving somewhere else. So they miss opportunities to help people mitigate the effects of climate change by providing employment, improving local infrastructure and construction methods and intervening to make local agriculture more robust.
This ignores the fact that movement has always been intertwined with business and enterprise, from the traders of the ancient Silk road to seasonal labour migrations following the work created by the ripening crops.
Internal and international migration raise the prospect of non-farm earnings in jobs that do not depend directly on the land and weather patterns, which are often increasingly unreliable as a result of climate change. But the benefit of migration are not solely financial: ideas, innovations and new technologies, such as producer co-operatives, water pumps and improved seeds, can be transmitted from urban centres and wealthy farming regions to less prosperous and more environmentally vulnerable rural backwaters.
The findings of the IED report and the fact that ‘environmental migrants’ are displaced by climate change - a largely man-made phenomena driven primarily by emissions for which certain countries can be held accountable - should signal a change of focus for US and EU governments. Rather than investing in increasingly stringent border security and identity card schemes in expectation of a flood of ‘environmental migrants’, more should be done to assist developing countries and developing country entrepreneurs to mitigate the effects of climate change by improving agricultural techniques, technologies and infrastructure and creating non-farm jobs. Equally important is the encouragement of environmental entrepreneurs in both rich and poor countries, especially those developing biofuel and solar technologies, whose innovations can help tackle the root causes of climate change.
Climate change will not drive people far from their homes. Short distance, short term movement suggests two things, firstly, that deep ties to home areas persist and, secondly, that people migrate temporarily in order to maintain a permanent family base in an increasingly economically unviable area. In other words: they move in order to stay put. Wealthy countries should concentrate on making life possible for those short distance, short term migrants, rather than equipping themselves for a mass influx which will not happen.
See also
‘‘Climate refugees will not flood rich nations’: study’ , Reuters, London, 24th June 2009