#migrationfoodforthought from Dr. Bishawjit Mallick of TU Dresden, expert on environmental migration, in response to this opinion.
A fresh approach to climate change migration: we need the most affected communities on board
Demand for a fresh approach to addressing climate change migration is timely. This article from the World Economic Forum proposes innovative measures. However, the decarbonizing of the global economy may be a bigger challenge than admitted by the writers. While reducing future extreme weather and climate events could certainly help improve or lower climate migration, achieving zero carbon emissions by 2050 is nearly impossible if some of the largest CO2 producing nations continue to refuse to participate in this mission.
The Global Compact on Migration proposes a bottom-up approach to planning, that would help find programs and strategies to increase the livelihood resilience of those most struggling with extreme weather and climatic events. For the Compact it is essential to identify the risks related to migration and non-migration and consider what programs or projects could work best. In line with this, considering the community acceptance of a project, so the actual disaster risk reduction measures but also whether the people affected would accept and follow those strategies, is crucial to the implementation of any of the measures proposed in the article to tackle climate migration. Also, these steps must be integrated and applied in parallel and holistically by every nation suffering from climatic hazards.
Read more:
E. Mavhura, “Applying a systems-thinking approach to community resilience analysis using rural livelihoods: The case of Muzarabani district, Zimbabwe,” Int. J. Disaster Risk Reduct., vol. 25, no. September, pp. 248–258, 2017.
J. Lewis, “Places, people and perpetuity : Community capacities in ecologies of catastrophe,” ACME An Int. E-Journal Crit. Geogr., vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 191–220, 2009.
S. L. Cutter, K. D. Ash, and C. T. Emrich, “The geographies of community disaster resilience,” Glob. Environ. Chang., vol. 29, 2014.
T. Lopez-Marrero and P. Tschakert, “From theory to practice: building more resilient communities in flood-prone areas,” Environ. Urban., vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 229–249, Apr. 2011.
B. Mallick, “Necessity of acceptance? Searching for a sustainable community-based disaster mitigation approach – the example of a coastal city in Bangladesh,” in Solutions to Coastal Disasters 2011, 2011, pp. 753–766.