Confronting Climate Migration Crises

Let me ask you both for a historical grounding or framework because I am a layman on this.

I'm very familiar with some of the journalistic writing about climate and migration.

I wanna ask you about two areas of the world, and I think I'm probably very in- influenced by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who I remember clearly linking political events in the Middle East around the Arab Spring to climate.

And I never bothered to find out if that really was scientifically supported.

I saw that, Alice, um, uh, when we had a back and forth by email, you were also talking about events that happened in Central America in 2014, where the security situation deteriorated in, uh, a number of countries, and that led to a wave of immigration.

I wanted to ask if that was-- if climate was a factor, uh, there.

So those two regions of the world, um, what is the science?

[laughs] Well, John, I'm a lawyer.

I don't know science.

[laughs]

[laughs]

But I can tell you our prevailing sort of, uh, c- conventional wisdom that we work with in the international legal space, which is that some of the typical ways that we think about conflict-induced displacement, or you think about conflict refugee settings, are worsened by climate factors.

And so when we think about how climate overplays into conflict refugee policy, that's how we think about it.

We think...

Take a Central American example.

Um, inherently, we have known for a decade that there's been a relatively large migration within and out of Central America because of increasing gang violence and weakening of, um- The s- um, the governments of those countries' capacity to control these gang issues.

Well, climate problems make that worse, so what's often referred to as the dry corridor, a series of droughts across parts of Central America that have made it harder to farm, that have made, in turn, harder for people to pay the taxes or the quotas that are enforced by the gangs, that make it harder for people to resist the idea of being recruited into gangs, that make it harder for the government itself to be able to be strong enough to control, um, some of the other factors that are leading to a weakened state.

These things seem interlinked, right? And that's the argument that people make, um, in the Syrian context as well.

Um, I can s- speak to the...

I, I can't speak to those specific examples that, that you just listed, um, in particular, but, uh, thinking about the, the literature on immigration, why people immigrate, why people leave a country that they were born in and move to another country.

Um, in general, uh, there are pull factors and push factors.

Pull factors that might draw someone, um, or a family to a new place.

It could be for economic opportunity, um, [lip smacks] uh, more political freedoms, things like that.

Um, then there's also push factors, things that make people want to leave the country that they were born in.

Um, and these c- these could be, you know, a lack of job opportunities, a lack of political freedom, for example, just, just to name those, those two.