Creating a political and social climate for climate change adaptation

Climate change will in coming decades lead to increased frequency and severity of floods, drought and extreme weather events. As the more exposed areas of the world become increasingly inhospitable, this will lead to substantial climate-induced displacement of people in developing countries. This project has assessed and analyzed how well households, communities and countries are able to cope with displacement caused by climate change and what influences attitudes among host community members towards migrants. To help address challenges of household relocation, we have developed a conceptual framework as well as a methodological approach to assess resettlement capacity of potential destinations for climate migrants. Focusing on livelihood (re)construction as the key to successful resettlement, the approach allows us to identify places with high resettlement capacity and their relative weaknesses so that those can be strengthened, for example, through resource allocation and infrastructural investments. To further promote methodology development on how to assess subnational capacity for resettlement, we have applied the framework to Ethiopia and Bangladesh, both countries that are highly exposed to climate change. The framework is also used to construct a global resettlement index. The impact of the Bangladesh index on policymaking was examined using a discrete choice experiment and 410 graduate students in Bangladesh as respondents. The results show that the resettlement index was used by the study participants because they perceived that the information embedded in the index improved their resettlement decisions. Resettlement of climate migrants is not just a matter of technical capacity, local perceptions of and willingness to receive migrants matter greatly. Through a survey conducted among 600 long-term residents of host communities in Bangladesh, we examined whether host-migrant proximities are important in understanding attitudes toward internal climate migrants. These proximities include host community members’ geographic distance to highly exposed areas from where the migrants are likely to come (spatial proximity); their values and worldviews concerning fellow citizens (attitudinal proximity); the extent to which they have experiences similar to those of migrants (experiential proximity); and their social similarity with the migrants in terms of education, wealth, and occupation (social proximity). Our results show that these proximities are important and that the attitudes toward internal climate migrants are not reducible to simple theories of resource and labor market competition. For example, the less-wealthy and the less-educated were considerably more positive to receiving internal climate migrants compared to those who were better-off. Two experiments were conducted to assess whether host community attitudes toward migrants are affected through information interventions or greater host-migrant interaction. A randomized field experiment conducted among 1200 long terms residents of host communities in Bangladesh shows that improving attitudes to migrants by changing the narrative about their situation is difficult. We found that shifting the responsibility from climate migrants towards natural forces, Western countries, and local authorities had no positive impact on attitudes to climate migrants. At worst, such narratives can be counterproductive: Our results suggest that such narratives may shift responsibility away from not just the migrants but also from the treated host community residents, and may increase social identification with the host community relative to outsiders. To examine how interaction with migrants impacts host community attitudes to migrants we conducted a randomized field experiment in Ethiopia. Our results indicate that interaction with a migrant significantly improved attitudes towards them and that subtle cues to economic matters or identity did not diminish this effect. However, we see similar effects on attitudes to migrants when hosts interact with other hosts, suggesting that the effects are driven by human interaction in general, rather than by interacting specifically with a migrant. The challenges of resettlement also depend on how prepared households in climate vulnerable locations are to relocate. To study household migration decisions in climate affected areas, the project conducted a survey and a discrete choice experiment among 400 households living in an extremely climate exposed area of coastal Bangladesh. Our results suggest that the poor expect to migrate because and when they have to, while the rich expect to migrate because and when they can. The results also show that households in this climate exposed area to a limited extent perceive migration as an adaptation strategy to climate change. The project was delivered by an international, multi-disciplinary team with substantial expertise in climate and development research.

The project has developed an approach to identify suitable places for resettlement of internal climate migrants in countries severely affected by climate change. Its basis, the climate change resettlement capacity (CCRC) framework, focuses on livelihood reconstruction as a key to successful resettlement and lays the foundation for constructing indicator-based indices to assess subnational units’ capacity to absorb internal climate migrants. The approach the project has developed provides a useful screening tool to identify potential resettlement places that can be assessed in-depth through more expensive but more comprehensive assessments. The project applied the CCRC framework to Bangladesh and Ethiopia to show its concrete potential, and the utility of the framework was demonstrated through a field experiment in Bangladesh which showed that future decisionmakers found the index trustworthy and valuable. Our research opens up for new methodologies and theorizations not only relevant for studies on adaptation to climate and environmental change but also for studies that seek to understand human agency and behavior in other contexts in which people may need to leave their homeplaces, such as in the case of violent conflicts, political repression, or economic decline. Our research results regarding attitudes among the host community members toward internal climate migrants in Bangladesh and Ethiopia bring light to the complexities regarding these attitudes and the challenges in deliberately trying to impact them. The panel data collected among 400 households living in extremely exposed areas of coastal Bangladesh also presents a highly valuable resource to build on and further study the effects of adverse climate events and how the households seek to cope with degrading environmental conditions. Our research outputs have the potential to assist international organizations, governments, planners, and policymakers in identifying the most suitable places to facilitate resettlement of communities in the face of current or anticipated displacements due to climate change and understanding how attitudes toward internal climate migrants evolve. The results have direct relevance for local, national, and international policies to facilitate adaptation to environmental change, including biodiversity loss, land and soil degradation, rising temperatures, more frequent flooding, and sea-level rise. As such, the project squarely addresses several Sustainable Development Goals, such as those regarding resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters, poverty reduction, access to food and well-being, and sustainability. The project results have been communicated through publications and presentations to the academic audience, user groups, and the general public. After the project end, we will continue to do so, among others, through contributions to the forthcoming World Bank World Development Report 2023 that focus on migration.

Climate change will in coming decades lead to increased frequency and severity of floods, drought and extreme weather events. As the more exposed areas of the world become increasingly inhospitable, this will lead to substantial climate induced displacement of people in developing countries. The particularly detrimental impacts of climate change in poor and fragile states, in terms of livelihoods, forced migration and conflict, are highlighted in the Norglobal call. It is likely that displacement will predominantly be internal to countries, or regional to neighbouring ones, but international migratory pressures will also increase. For affected countries and communities, this creates challenges in accommodating the displaced, and in avoiding social tension and conflicts that may arise. This project will assess and analyze how well countries and communities are able to cope with displacement. We will create a Global Resettlement Index (GloRI) assessing the adaptive capacity of individual countries to climate induced displacement, using detailed georeferenced data. We will also conduct more in-depth analyses in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, two fragile states commonly held to be among the world's most vulnerable to climate change. A disaggregated Bangladesh Resettlement Index (BaRI) will be created to guide local authority responses to displacement. Crucially, our analysis includes political and social impediments to resettlement, including social divisions and attitudes which can make integration of displaced people into new host communities difficult. Through a series of experiments in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, we will analyze how political and social narratives and discourse shape attitudes towards the displaced among long term residents of communities experiencing in-migration from climate affected areas. The project improves the basis for effective policy making in addressing displacement at the local, national and international levels.