What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically making the connections between cause and effect (between climate change and migration) is pretty easy and serves a useful purpose – it highlights an issue and a set of tangible actions that the government can either deliver on or think further about. But there two things we need to take into account.
Firstly, everyone seems to agree there is a real dearth of evidence on the causal links between risks and issues. Much of what we know rests on stories, specific observations, estimates (or in some cases guesstimates) and anecdotes. All of these are time and context specific and yet they can have a major effect on the system often resulting in superficial and perverse actions. For one thing it is much easier for governments and international institutions to focus on ‘food bombing’, ‘blanket throwing’ and ‘water distribution’ than identifying and managing root causes which demands sophisticated, process driven approaches based on a shared awareness of the problem and a common agenda.
This leads to a second issue – that we don’t have a standard approach across the system to conflict or fragile and failing states and as we don’t always agree on the scale and nature of the problem we (government’s, international institutions and NGOs) end up taking quite differing approaches (so for example we focus on public education when we should be thinking of risk reduction)… this doesn’t mean we should be looking for a unified theory of development, as one NGO person scoffed at but it does mean evidence becomes a key factor in how we manage the problems in the future.
