When discussing the human security impacts of climate change, climate-induced migration is often viewed as a distant and intangible concern. Despite widespread consensus on “loss and damage” at COP27 in Egypt last November, climate migration in developing countries was barely mentioned. However, the reality is that climate migration is already occurring at an unimaginable scale.

The World Bank estimates that South Asia will face a crisis of 50 million climate refugees each year by 2050, resulting from both short-term natural disasters like floods and cyclones and slow-onset environmental changes such as sea-level rise, soil degradation, and desertification.

Experts suggest that climate migration is a “threat multiplier” that will result in the overcrowding of cities, conflict over land and resources, and regional instability. In other words, climate migration is viewed as a dire negative outcome of climate change, and a crisis that must be managed and minimized. However, this framing does not reflect ground realities, and migration has been a viable adaptive strategy to changing environmental conditions for decades. Nomadic pastoralism in the Himalayan-Kush region, seasonal fishing in Maldives, and circular rural-urban migration in Bangladesh are just a few examples of migration as climate adaptation in South Asia.

Migration can be an effective and sustainable climate adaptation mechanism in South Asia if supported by the necessary institutional and policy frameworks. In the face of changing environmental and resulting economic and security concerns, governments should not only facilitate safe and orderly migration where local adaptation is no longer feasible, but also incorporate migration as a climate adaptation strategy into their development agendas.

Read the full article in The Diplomat.