David J. Wrathall

Migration Amidst Climate Rigidity Traps: Resource Politics and Social-Ecological Possibilism in Honduras and Peru

According to dominant narratives about adaptation to climate change, those facing worst-case scenarios, without means at their disposal to adapt in situ, face an ineluctable set of adaptation strategies that ultimately includes the permanent abandonment of geographic spaces rendered uninhabitable and unproductive for human use. Yet environmental stress and adaptive capacity are distributed unevenly, and power structures play a role in fashioning them. It is argued here that when access to land and water are impacted by environmental stress, the structures that mediate their access are reinforced, even as the adaptive alternatives for smallholders are undermined. In this way, dominant resource regimes set up migration as the primary viable alternative for adaptation among a dwindling set of choices. This framework is applied to two early analogues of climate change impacts: flooded Garífuna villages of Hondurass North Coast and communities enduring glacier recession and shifting hydrologic regimes in Perus Cordillera Blanca. In both cases, stress motivates new forms of migration that reinforce dominant power structures. In Honduras, migrants from wealthier social strata are moving on a more permanent basis, and in Peru, the once historical pattern of labor migration is becoming a practical necessity. These cases underscore the role of political economy in adaptation to climate change and adaptive migration in particular.

Sea-level commitment as a gauge for climate policy

A well-defined relationship between global mean sea-level rise and cumulative carbon emissions can be used to inform policy about emission limits to prevent dangerous and essentially permanent anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

Labour migration amidst ecological change

One of the grand questions for research on the impacts of climate change is whether people can rely on migration to safeguard progress towards development even while experiencing severe environmental hardship. This is the ‘migration as adaptation’ hypothesis. Labour migration theory proposes assumptions about the use of migration by people faced with economic uncertainty and limited access to capital to raise standards of development. This paper asks how environmental stress affects labour migration, and evaluates the labour migration arising from a spectrum of ecological stress, from increasingly variable precipitation to catastrophic flooding in Honduras and Malawi. Evidence suggests that environmental stress changes the nature of labour migration. New environmental forms of mobility do not take forms predicted by labour migration theory; migrations are not made with the purpose of exploiting economic opportunities; they do not take place on the basis of rational choice, particularly as displaced persons are frequently emotionally stressed; and among environmental migrants are those less likely to be able to absorb costs and extract benefits associated with migration (i.e. the unwell, the elderly or the unskilled). Nevertheless, social networks still remain the principal medium for conferring access to labour alternatives and resources to invest in migration. In the end, the remittances that environmental migrants send are less likely to be used for investment in development.