Climate Change, Human Mobility, and ‘Immobility Traps’
By: Minuri Perera*
Unlike the much-reviewed nexus of environmental migration, immobility traps remain to be a less discussed reality. Despite wanting to escape the impacts of climate change, some people, often the most vulnerable and marginalised stratas of the society, may not be able to do so because they do not have adequate resources.
With extreme and slow-onset weather events becoming more frequent and more severe, Climate Change’s impact on human mobility has become an international topic of conversation. Sudden-onset events such as floods, hurricanes, tsunamis etc and slow-onset events such as sea level rise, increasing temperatures, ocean acidification, glacial retreat, salinization, land and forest degradation, loss of biodiversity, and desertification have either displaced people living in ecologically vulnerable destinations or compelled them to adopt migration as an adaptation measure to withstand losses and damages associated with climate change. In fact, by mid-1990, 25 million were already forced to migrate on account of climate-related calamities. It is believed today that by 2050, there could be approximately 200 million people displaced or forced to migrate owing to disruptions caused to life, assets, properties, and livelihoods by climate change.
The decision to migrate in the wake of climatic stressors is one that is multi-faceted. In other words, it is unlikely that climate change alone would become the sole driver of migration. According to the UK’s Foresight project on ‘Migration and Global Environment Change’ (2011), it involves a variety of economic factors such as employment opportunities and the likelihood of earning higher wages elsewhere; social factors such as seeking education and kinship obligations; political factors such as insecurity, policy intervention, and direct coercion; and finally demographic factors such as population structure, population density, and disease prevalence. However, even in the presence of one or more aforementioned factors, one’s ability to move away can be further constrained by micro factors such as one’s age, sex, education, wealth, marital status, ethnicity, and language and meso factors such as political/legal frameworks, the cost of moving, maintenance of social networks and diasporic links, and the existence of recruitment agencies.
Unlike the much-reviewed nexus of environmental migration, immobility traps remain to be a less discussed reality. Despite wanting to escape the impacts of climate change, some people, often the most vulnerable and marginalised stratas of the society, may not be able to do so because they do not have adequate resources. Furthermore, trapped populations are distinctly gendered, aged, classed, and even raced. This indicates that those who face immobility traps are made doubly vulnerable, on the one hand ecologically, as they are forced to live in areas that are more prone to the impacts of climate change, and on the other hand socially, as inability to move, whether it is voluntary or involuntary, that has exacerbated their existing vulnerabilities.
Interesting insights pertaining to gendered immobility traps are drawn from Bangladesh, whereby in the wake of climatic stressors, men may migrate seeking opportunities of income diversification elsewhere while women, children, and the elderly [voluntarily] stay behind. Rather involuntarily too, in the wake of rapid-onset events, their mobility is constrained by most women’s inability to swim, their clothing, responsibilities of childcare, and the fear of sexual and physical abuse. Resultantly, with 90% of fatalities in 1991 Cyclone Gorky in Bangladesh being women, women tend to face a greater disaster mortality rate as opposed to their male counterparts.
While most immobility traps may seemingly exist in low-income countries, the phenomenon is not entirely absent in high-income countries. For example, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the wealthier residents of New Orleans could afford to take precautionary measures by preemptively moving. This was a luxury denied for African American residents, coincidentally the city’s poorer strata, who were coerced to live in low-lying, flood-prone areas due to discriminatory post-slavery zoning practices and redlining. Consequently, they were more severely affected by the Hurricane than their white counterparts. Their immobility was further aggravated in the aftermath of the Hurricane, as they were unable to return home, hence continued to be displaced, as homeownership and flood insurance coverage were luxuries denied for them.
Human mobility in the context of climate change is nuanced. However, it is clear that immobility traps warrant further policy attention.
*Minuri is a guest columnist. She is a junior research professional at the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) currently working under the Sustainable Development thematic. She holds a B.Sc. Honours Degree in International Development from the University of London and a BA Honours Degree in Economics specialising in Trade and Industry from the University of Colombo. Her areas of Interest include Environmental Economics, Global Environmental Problems and Politics, Environmental Impact Assessment, Sustainable Development, International Trade and SME Development.
