Sam Huckstep News Today

To adapt to climate change, people will move. The results will not be all bad

Last year, we highlighted five areas to watch in the world of refugee policy; they remain just as important today. This year, we’ll highlight some of our recent work on these areas. Our findings surprised us, shifted our views, and shaped our engagement, and we hope they can contribute to meaningful progress for displaced people.

Climate change will have major ramifications for migration at every level. This brief reviews issues faced in the governance of climate-affected migration at the internal, regional, and international levels and proposes policy actions in numerous spheres of action.

In 2020, we opened our end-of-year review by saying that “Not even Dr. Pangloss could put a positive spin on… a historic dumpster fire of a year.” The next year, we described 2021 as “not quite the best of times, not quite the worst of times”, which seemed like progress. But if we take one lesson from 2022, it’s that things can always get worse.

Datasets that have integrated migration and climate data are hard to come by. The Terrapops project, for example, provides extracts that include both migration data (built using national censuses) and climate data. These are useful, but variables in a single extract are often cataloged across different time periods, at varying frequencies, and at different resolutions, reflecting the different census choices made by contributing countries. The lack of standardization makes a single international...

On 3 March 2022, Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) Research held a launch seminar at the Institute of Development Studies and online. We discussed the plans for the next three years, during which the research team will be examining the challenges of providing more effective social assistance to people in protracted crises in some of the world’s most challenging contexts.