Earth Today | Local scientists urge consideration for forced migration due to climate change
Published:Thursday | January 2, 2020 | 12:00 AM
WITH THE many challenges of climate change, it may be easy to overlook for action the forced migration of Caribbean nationals, which is a real possibility, given the projections for sea level rise and coastal erosion.
It is against this background that local scientists have flagged the issue for consideration by not only national, but also regional governments.
“I don’t think we are thinking about migration sufficiently, and certainly in the Caribbean, I don’t think it is a big issue for us. I think it is certainly something that should occupy more space on our agenda. Some effective planning and thought needs to go into it,” said Eleanor Jones.
She heads the consultancy firm Environmental Solutions Limited and is a geographer with expertise in environmental risk assessment, management systems and strategy, as well as comprehensive disaster management.
“We are a people very attached to place and so even when we have disasters and places are destroyed, people simply go back to their original places. People tend to want to remain because of this attachment to place, and so we really ought to be thinking of adaptation and how we assess the risk, to see how we can assist persons in vulnerable areas to pre-empt and minimise the losses,” Jones added.
Dr Donovan Campbell, a lecturer at The University of the West Indies, Mona, and a scientist who has served the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said there is a clear need to examine the issue.
“For example, if you attribute what is happening with hurricanes and look at what happened to Barbuda, you will see where the hurricane itself affected the island displacing residents. There are other cases where coastal communities, because of accelerated rates of coastal erosion, have been forced to move further inland or to relocate,” he said.
“And displacement is not just about the loss of tangible space, but that tangible space is also linked to cultural identity, and so when you are forced to move to another space, that comes with a cultural and identity risk as well,” Campbell added.
ANTICIPATORY PLANNING
He has proposed ‘anticipatory planning’, through a climate change mainstreaming approach, in order to minimise the fallout from forced migration.
“If you have the right institutions and policies in place, then people might be able to adjust. So the push should be towards anticipatory planning and not to be reactive. We know that coastal communities across the Caribbean are at risk, so we have to anticipate that migration is a possible outcome of this, and responsible governance processes should accommodate this in a meaningful way,” he noted.
The views of Jones and Campbell come in the wake of research work by Professor Michelle Mycoo, who herself highlighted the need to give attention to forced migration.
“The Caribbean may have among the world’s highest numbers of environmental and economic refugees. Settlements in coastal locations make them highly vulnerable to climate change impacts such as sea level rise and flooding,” she said, writing in her 2017 research paper, titled Beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius: vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies for Caribbean small island developing states.
“The relocation of tens of thousands of climate change migrants from coastal, urban areas, due to the consequences of natural hazards and climate change impacts, is an increasing possibility for some countries, such as Haiti, The Bahamas, Guyana, Suriname and Belize,” Mycoo added.