For Climate Migrants, Does the Past Shape Current Perceptions of Conflict?

As climate change has altered environments across the globe, it has caused mass migration. For example, an intense drought in Honduras recently led thousands of people to leave their homes and head north to Mexico for an opportunity to earn an agriculture-based living. In Honduras and many other countries impacted by climate change, shifting conditions have led to a rapid decrease in labor supply. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, an average of 26 million people have been forced to leave their homes annually in recent years. As increasing numbers of people have been forced to migrate due to climate change, many have ended up in areas affected by other challenges, including simmering conflict and discontent among existing residents.

In a recent study, researchers Vally Koubi, Tobias Böhmelt, Gabriele Spilker, and Lena Schaffer examined the experiences of climate migrants and their perceptions of conflicts in their new homes. The authors focused on how exposure to different types of environmental events, such as droughts, fires and floods, shape migrants’ perceptions of conflict in their new places of residence. In effect, the authors sought to answer the question of how leaving a place impacted by climate change affects if and how migrants viewed conflict.

To conduct their study, the researchers used the International Disaster Database to select relevant regions. They then conducted more than 3000 micro-level surveys completed in five developing countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Nicaragua, and Peru). Since a random sample of migrants is hard to achieve, the researchers used a “snowballing” method to identify migrants who previously lived in the same location as the non-migrants did. Then, the authors sought to measure the concept of “relative deprivation”—a level of discontent climate migrants may feel as a result of their experiences with environmental devastation and conflict in their new homes.

As part of the study, the researchers identified four distinct categories of perceived conflicts: social or psychological conflict (e.g., discrimination), economic conflict (e.g., unemployment), environmental conflict (e.g., water accessibility) and political conflict (e.g., community violence). The researchers developed such categories to obtain disaggregated views on conflict perceptions together with a generalized picture. Besides that, several control variables were introduced into the research design, such as respondents’ gender and age, household migration (whether any other family members migrated), and economic context (education, household status, self-assessment of reason for migrating and occupation). A multi-level regression model was applied to empirically analyze the connection between the environmental events and the perceived conflict, which showed a positive and significant correlation, especially for long-term environmental events.

Among the study’s most significant findings was that variation in migrants’ perceptions of conflict was directly related to the type of environmental event that caused them to move in the first place. Migrants who had experienced long-run degradation of their environments (such as droughts, salinity increases or desertification) in their original homes were more likely to perceive conflict in their new homes than those who were displaced by short-term events (like floods, typhoons or landslides). However, the authors also found that people who suffered from short-term disasters had an increasingly negative estimation of their well-being over time. Particularly, the authors also showed that there was a significant gap between migrants’ actual levels of economic activity and their expectations under better climatic conditions, regardless of conflict in the region.

Ultimately, the authors have provided a new lens through which to examine the impact of environmental change on migrants’ perceptions of conflict. Existing literature around climate change and conflict has tended to understand environmental events as “multipliers” or “catalysts” through which existing economic, political or social issues have emerged (such as poor resource management, flawed governance institutions and food insecurity). This study, however, serves as a reminder to policymakers that the mindset of climate migrants has been influenced and shaped by what they have been through before leaving their home countries. Climate change is shaping the movement and perceptions of millions of people every year and will likely intensify over time—a fact governments must consider as they seek to implement environmental policies for the future.

Article source: Koubi, Vally, Tobias Böhmelt, Gabriele Spilker, and Lena Schaffer. “The Determinants of Environmental Migrants’ Conflict Perception.” International Organization 72, No. 4 (2018): 905–36.

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