Prevention and preparedness: Evidence for policies

Policymakers need to consider a responsive approach to ensure that policies address the complex interactions between mobility, climate and food security. Paying attention to research and emerging evidence – especially when that research questions, confirms or dismisses underlying assumptions – enables policymakers to better understand how climate risks can translate into food insecurity, and how this may or not result in different outcomes, including displacement and involuntary immobility. The potential positive impacts of mobility on food security can also be better understood and leveraged if attention is paid to the different ways that it affects various groups, including migrants themselves, their households and communities of destination. Failing to acknowledge such nuances may mean that underlying causes of food insecurity are overlooked, potentially leading to policies resulting in poor or even counterproductive outcomes.¹⁰⁵ Complex analyses are required to avoid oversimplifications such as assigning the full causality of food insecurity to climate change.¹⁰⁶

Climatic risk and income volatility exist everywhere, but they are particularly challenging for poor populations in developing countries: “risk is costlier for households close to subsistence, because a small negative shock can rapidly transition into malnutrition and underdevelopment traps”.¹⁰⁷ Successful interventions to address food security and support climate adaptation require deep and inclusive engagement with local vulnerability contexts, as well as understanding and addressing local shocks that affect particular populations either continuously or simultaneously.¹⁰⁸

Current policy frameworks on climate change and human mobility

Many policy frameworks seek to address the complexities behind climate change and human mobility.¹⁰⁹ As the main international framework addressing the governance of international migration, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration provides specific recommendations regarding disasters, environmental degradation and climate change.¹¹⁰ The Global Compact identifies food security as an area of work for States to “minimize the adverse drivers and structural factors that compel people to leave their country of origin”, while recommending the adoption of adequate policies and mechanisms to enable safe migration pathways in the form of “admission and stay of appropriate duration based on compassionate, humanitarian or other considerations for migrants compelled to leave their countries of origin owing to sudden-onset natural disasters and other precarious situations” and “solutions for migrants compelled to leave their countries of origin owing to slow-onset natural disasters, the adverse effects of climate change, and environmental degradation”.¹¹¹

With regard to climate change governance, one of the outcomes of the Twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt (COP27), was the agreement to establish institutional arrangements to set a fund for loss and damage compensation under the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. These arrangements were informed by gaps in the current funding landscape, including in terms of “displacement, relocation, migration, insufficient climate information and data”.¹¹² This system potentially offers an opportunity to begin to manage the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable households, and to address the losses and damage incurred not only as a result of climate change but also as a result of the subsequent mobility and immobility. The work on human mobility under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is undertaken by the Task Force on Displacement under the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage, but more effort is needed to mainstream mobility in adaptation planning. To this end, different countries have started to integrate mobility dimensions in their adaptation planning, which bodes well for the future.¹¹³

Considerations of human mobility have also been increasingly incorporated into the disaster risk reduction agenda, under the umbrella of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. There, human mobility is considered both in terms of evacuations and planned relocation, but the vulnerabilities of migrant populations are also noted, and the need to integrate migrant contributions in disaster risk reduction is highlighted.

These approaches are underpinned by the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which establishes the importance of considering the situation of migrants and vulnerable communities. While no specific goal addresses directly the climate–migration nexus, it is a topic relevant to several different objectives, notably those surrounding food security and hunger, resilient communities, migration policies and climate issues. Human-rights-based approaches to the climate–migration nexus have also progressed rapidly in recent years, including through the catalysing role of the Nansen Protect Agenda on cross-border disaster displacement, the integration of disasters into the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (and the more recent Action Agenda on Internally Displaced Persons), and various regional approaches to the question of rights and climate mobility.¹¹⁴

To be successful, policies on the climate–food security–migration nexus need to consider the availability of resources for action, and to envision the conditions under which migration can be a viable coping strategy.¹¹⁵ Poor and impoverished communities sometimes lack the resources necessary to adapt, even when they may have information and intention to do so. Policy frameworks – and their implementation – accordingly have to recognize enabling factors and institutional environments that facilitate policy adoption (and reduce obstacles to implementation), including institutional capacity and governance, leveraging expertise from various areas of government action.¹¹⁶ Policies oriented towards local, national and international governance can all influence the outcomes of climate‑related mobilities.¹¹⁷ In addition, policies intended to promote food security in climate-vulnerable countries should extend beyond merely technical and economic aspects of agriculture, and also address sociocultural dimensions,¹¹⁸ including efforts to incorporate traditional knowledge and diverse gender perspectives.¹¹⁹

Designing inclusive policies

Approaches that address links between climate hazards and food security by incorporating lessons from Indigenous knowledge and by paying attention to local context can help to shape inclusive policy.¹²⁰ For instance, studies in Aceh Province of Indonesia have shed light on the use of traditional buildings made of drifting logs; these buildings can be used both under normal conditions and also during floods, as a mechanism to maintain household and communal activities and protect community food supply needs, which are increasingly under threat due to shortages of raw materials and relocation away from the river.¹²¹ Similarly, in the field of financial inclusion, localized and contextualized interventions have been shown to be better able to reduce the probability of food shortages.¹²² There is much more to learn from local and Indigenous knowledge, not only in order to be more inclusive, but also to be successful in sustainable ways.

Critical reviews of adaptation interventions have highlighted the diversity of outcomes that they can have on vulnerability, including some unintended negative consequences:

• Interventions can reinforce vulnerability through elite capture of processes, with reliance on powerful insiders and disregard for affected populations’ perspectives, including the exacerbation of conflict and tensions;
• Interventions can redistribute vulnerability, for instance, shifting risk in coastal areas, affecting access to resources for different groups and reshaping power dynamics;
• Interventions can create new sources of vulnerability, by addressing a short-term risk while introducing new long-term problems, such as undertaking poorly planned relocation exercises.¹²³

Evidence also indicates that policies are more effective when they include gender-responsive capacity development.¹²⁴ Policies that focus on enhancing farmer education levels, empowering women, promoting generational knowledge exchange, and providing emergency food support in the lean season or following extreme weather events have proven successful to improve local adaptation.¹²⁵ Case studies in Mali, Bangladesh, Asia’s lowlands and Central America highlight, with local nuances, the added value of contextualized interventions and gender mainstreaming with affected populations; however, mobility components are not always integrated in these approaches.¹²⁶

Information alone is not enough. Solutions must also be financed.

Evidence and information play a key role in ensuring climate resilience, and remain an important axis of priorities to address food insecurity in subsistence agriculture settings. However, reviews have also found a relatively limited application of analytical outputs in African agricultural development, indicating a need for more locally relevant information products combined with practical support.¹²⁷ Information availability (for example, climate forecasts and agricultural best practices) is therefore not enough, as this information needs to be based on local needs and must be supported by funding provided to local actors so they can implement evidence-based solutions. Case studies in Central America show that regions where the livelihoods of communities are based on climate-sensitive subsistence crops tend to have fewer resources to promote innovation and action for adaptation;¹²⁸ in such cases, even when locally relevant information is available, therefore, adaptation and innovation will be impossible, or at best only slowly implemented.

The development of early warning systems has received strong political backing in recent years, and different models have been developed for their application in vulnerable areas, such as Kenya’s arid north, taking into consideration local circumstances and famine risks.¹²⁹  Drought early warning systems measure and report on key drivers of drought, “with the preferred use of meteorological and remotely sensed drought indices.”¹³⁰ Scope remains to improve the usefulness of such systems by orienting indexes towards local circumstances, development approaches and human welfare.

To be successful, food security approaches that are based on agricultural innovation and new technology must consider existing capacities and the potential to further embed existing power asymmetries based on the different resources available to manage climate risks.¹³¹ In sub-Saharan Africa, increased efforts are required to address the technological needs of adaptation, given the “minimal documentation of current applications and prospects of digitalization for sustainable agricultural practices in Africa, particularly in an increasingly urbanized era”.¹³² Leading developmental agencies are pursuing other approaches to food security as well, in order to manage climate risk associated with food production for adaptation in place. These include forecast-based finance, microinsurance programmes and anticipatory actions.¹³³ The financial sustainability, implementation and adoption of these types of programmes by stakeholders under climate change are still under investigation, given the uncertainties of climate scenarios and the increasing climate hazards worldwide as they relate to financial risk distribution.¹³⁴

Addressing power asymmetries, land distribution and human mobility

The prevailing model under which the globalized food industry produces food is primarily aimed at increasing food security from the individual to the national and international levels. But the complexities around the climate–food security–migration nexus require us to question this model. Evidence suggests that it has resulted in the alienation of large populations in developing countries from the means of production – including access to land – and in promoting policies that contribute to environmental degradation.¹³⁵

The prevailing model has resulted in further entrenching systemic power asymmetries, such as a reduced role for smallholder farmers. When considering food production and human mobility dynamics, unequal access to land, limited coping capacities of smallholders, and exclusion and discrimination dynamics can become significant drivers of displacement.¹³⁶ Studies undertaken in South-East Asia, for example, have found that the rise of megaplantations and their associated power dynamics have led to human and non-human displacement in multiple landscapes.¹³⁷ Similar processes have been identified in Guatemala, where studies found that “in the northern provinces of Petén and Quiché, 36% and 63% of oil palm expansion occurred over former basic grain farmland, while 16% and 22% displaced fallow land, and 17% and 12% displaced tropical forests, just between 2010 and 2019”.¹³⁸ Thus, in this case, the expansion of the oil palm industry disrupted local food systems in areas of subsistence agriculture and displaced local populations. And in northern Ghana, studies have shown that uncertain land ownership has negative consequences for food security, which is in turn linked to migration as a coping mechanism.¹³⁹

There are promising practices to address food insecurity at the local level and prevent displacement. These include promotion of land tenure security of adequate agricultural land; farmer empowerment groups; gender-responsive components; and the expansion of dietary diversity through crop diversification and agroforestry initiatives. In Zambia, for instance, “policies supporting livestock development programs such as training of farmers in animal husbandry, as well as policies increasing land tenure security and empowerment of farmers groups, have the potential to enhance household food and nutrition security”.¹⁴⁰ Securing the land tenure of indigenous groups has been identified as a critical priority to prevent environmental degradation and to improve food security outcomes of vulnerable communities.¹⁴¹

Policies centred on human well-being

Forward-looking policy responses can also be designed to acknowledge that human mobility is likely to increase in upcoming years due to the rate of environmental change and associated food and water crises,¹⁴² and that will consider the potential vulnerability of immobile populations. Preparing future migrants and communities can reduce migrants’ vulnerabilities, increase the positive outcomes experienced by origin and destination communities, and ensure the fulfilment of human rights, particularly given the potential protection gaps that migrants will face without adequate policies in place. This has been emphasized in numerous statements and resolutions by human rights bodies around the world, with a recent example highlighting the important role of State actors:

Faced with migrant workers and others who mobilize for reasons directly or indirectly associated with climate change, States must guarantee due process during the procedure leading to the recognition of their migratory status, and in any case guarantee their human rights, such as the safeguard of non-refoulement while their status is determined.¹⁴³

Policies are also needed to protect migrant communities and promote the fulfilment of their human rights, both while in transit and once they arrive at their destinations. As in-country rural to urban migration compounds with international migration to urban centres, the expansion of safe housing will continue to be a focus of new policies.¹⁴⁴ Policies in this arena need to consider access to public assistance for recently arrived migrant communities. Evidence suggests that non-citizens and children of non-citizens are more likely to be exposed to high levels of food insecurity and require specific attention.¹⁴⁵ Work is increasingly being done to examine the mental health impacts of environmental hazards and mobility, including through prevailing gender dynamics. These were important issues after Hurricane Katrina in the United States, and also in the framework of rural–urban migration processes in Jamaica,¹⁴⁶ for example.

The well-being of seasonal and temporary migrants in the agricultural sector should also be a greater focus of human-centred policies. Different analysis of the well-being of agricultural migrant workers, in particular in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, have shed light on the prevalence of conditions of vulnerability and of human rights abuses.¹⁴⁷ A comprehensive approach to the food security–human mobility nexus in the context of climate change requires that authorities and employers improve the conditions of migrants in the agricultural sector. These migrant workers – as demonstrated during COVID-19 – can be some of the most essential contributors to the fundamental functioning of societies around the world, and yet they can be some of the most marginalized and exploited.¹⁴⁸

All of these examples demonstrate that, as discussed above, the outcome of any particular instance of climate mobility is highly dependent on the circumstances in which that movement takes place.¹⁴⁹ It is extremely dangerous, even in the attempt to justify and promote climate action, to simplify the narrative around climate change and migration. Doing so risks “occlud[ing] the multiple forces that lead young Sahelian migrants”, in one particular instance, to emigrate, and diverts attention from potential responses.¹⁵⁰ Similarly, an analysis of United Kingdom media shows an oversimplification of climate change mobility, removing it from context, with the potential to augment xenophobic voices and undermine integration and social cohesion.¹⁵¹ In order to mobilize resources for climate adaptation and food security interventions, discourses that leverage potential negative reactions towards migrants must be prevented.