The relationship between climate change and migration has been researched for over three decades, and yet remains fragmented and fraught with the attribution question: are migrants forcibly displaced because of climate change or other factors?

It is by now clear that multicausal environmental conditions, such as floods or loss of land produce severe or extreme distress are driving forced evacuation or other catastrophic need for movement away from danger. We also understand some of the associations with long-term and temporary migration as well as domestic versus cross-border moves (Kaczan and Orgill-Meyer 2020). Other conditions, such as prolonged exposure to sporadic hazards, are manifested in heightened insecurity and are stochastic with fuzzy patterns of out-migration (Pedersen 1995; Piguet, Pécoud, and de Guchteneire 2011; Wiederkehr, Beckmann, and Hermans 2018).

In the mitigation space, secondary and tertiary level carbon emissions (Scope 2&3 emissions) are clearly understood as being ancillary effects of the consumption cycle, such as transportation or packaging. It is therefore relatively easy to generate policies at an organisational or product level to examine a supply chain in its entirety. In migration studies, however, a similar extension has not been made of secondary or tertiary effects of climate change as well as other conditions, including social and economic capital, on a household’s decision to pack up and move.

Part of the difficulty is that the links between climate change and migration are at least two or three steps away and multicausal. If a farmer moves from a rural community to the nearby urban settlement, it might be because his crops failed and the non-farm enterprise that his son managed collapsed due to macroeconomic conditions, which themselves have a strong connection to energy geopolitics. Similarly, a widow might lose her farm and her job at the local school and use her meagre inheritance to pay a broker for international passage.

Each of these conditions might be linked partly or wholly to climate change combined with lack of institutional support and other factors. Conventional attribution studies will not link these events satisfactorily in complex social systems, even by modelling their combined effects on families to climate change, because their imputed relationships are too simplistic and do not account for emergent effects while aggregating assumed orthogonal factors.

Nevertheless, in a growing number of empirical cases, there are clear proximate and distant connections between climate change and migration. Establishing these with scientific verity is important because the outcomes of rising migration are especially alarming, a rise in overall impoverishment, lack of meaningful life activities, worsening crime and violence, and so on (Longhi 2012; Jørgensen 2016). This means that there is a wide field for exploration in the social dimension of adaptation strategies to climate change that include migration.

This special issue of Frontiers in Climate aims to compile a diverse selection of papers, including empirical and theoretical contributions to addressing contemporary questions around climate change and forced migration.

Set against this background, we welcome papers that:

• Propose viable legal and regional political arrangements for asylum seekers
• Analyse global political conditions that may act as barriers or opportunities for addressing asylum seekers in the future
• Identify sources of vulnerability in climate-change induced displacement hotspots
• Report examples and case studies of human migration as expressions of climate change adaptation
• Report on field studies that add insights to drivers and conditions for migration (and trapped populations) and the mitigating roles of social networks and support provided by NGOs and other charitable action during and following disasters
• Provide empirical and conceptual contributions exploring the linkages between climate change and migration in areas of causation, attribution, human rights, and/or justice
• Propose other ethical arguments for addressing the needs of asylum seekers

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Frontiers in Climate

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