MIGRATION due to climate change impacts has long been recognized as a problem the world is going to have to address in the near future, and a climate that is heating up at a far faster rate than even the most pessimistic models indicated just a few years ago has prompted researchers and policymakers to take a closer look at the issue. There is a growing number of experts who are calling for a new approach to climate- or weather-induced migration, and we believe they have a sound argument that should guide the pertinent policies in this country.
The reexamination of the way in which migration is handled by governments is prompted by two key characteristics of migration caused by climate effects. First, the large majority of climate migration will be internal, with people displaced within countries rather than moving from one country to another. Second, nearly all of the migration will be from rural to urban areas, or in some cases, from at-risk urban areas to other urban areas.
As the Philippines is one of the most at-risk countries for climate change impacts, it is also highly at risk for increased internal migration as a result. It is not an entirely unfamiliar problem. For decades, Metro Manila and other urban areas of the Philippines have experienced a steady influx of rural-to-urban migrants seeking better economic opportunities; a large proportion of these people find themselves inhabiting the euphemistically named “informal settlements” within the cities, which causes an entirely new set of problems, both for the settlers and their host cities.
This type of internal migration has typically been addressed here in the Philippines, as in many other developing countries, by prioritizing resettlement of the affected populations. The effort is well-meaning; slum areas are properly considered unsafe, unhealthy and altogether inadequate for their residents. However, resettlement does not often have the intended results because developing communities that fully meet the needs that drove the people into the cities in the first place is expensive and time-consuming. Newly resettled residents often find they again lack sufficient access to livelihoods and public services, and are obliged to return to the cities.
Climate migration only differs from economic migration in that it can affect more people — although the poor are still disproportionately affected — and that its cause or causes may be more obvious. Here in the Philippines, obvious climate-related causes are frequent tropical storms and the damage they cause, and heat waves that ruin agriculture; on a longer timescale, rising sea levels are likely to force some people to relocate as well.
Focus on host cities
Just as with economic migration, “fixing” the problem of climate migration by addressing its causes is time-consuming and expensive. Building a sustainable resettlement community that properly meets the needs of the people for whom it is intended is as difficult and uncertain of success regardless of which root causes are involved. Since focusing on resettlement, which is to say, focusing on the migrants themselves, has a record of poor results virtually everywhere it has been tried, the new idea is to instead focus on the cities that host internal migrant populations.
The approach makes sense. In spite of cities containing the larger part of the world’s climate-affected population, only about 10 percent of global funding for climate adaptation and mitigation goes to cities. That is unfortunate, because city governments are often more active in more direct ways with climate initiatives than national governments. City governments are in the best position to assess citizens’ actual needs — secure housing, access to basic utilities and transportation, schools, health care and other public services — and understand in specific detail what is needed to make their cities more climate-resilient. Directing funding and technical assistance at cities helps them to transform internal migrants from a public burden — which is the underlying perspective of the approach that prioritizes resettlement — into a population asset.
Plus the most practical reason for supporting the cities that host internal migrants is perhaps the simplest one; resettlement invariably means people are moving at least twice. Solving the problem of internal migration with an approach that adds a different mode of migration does not make sense, and the unsatisfactory results of years of resettlement efforts tend to confirm that.