Policy Briefs on Climate Change and Conflict

This policy brief seeks to examine the key barriers and limits preventing the Pacific from achieving its climate security goals through adaptation and what options might exist for the Pacific to overcome such constraints. Climate change remains the single greatest security threat to the Pacific Islands region. With emissions gaps persisting and agreements on mitigation efforts remaining contested, enabling opportunities for adaptation is now more crucial than ever for Pacific Island countries to meet their climate security ambitions.

This Policy Brief compares communities in Alaska and the Pacific Islands, which are worlds apart in many ways, yet share cascading impacts from climate change. Communities in both geographies that may want to relocate have limited resources to do so without external assistance. Each country should have policies in place to provide assistance for community-led relocation based on the preferences, knowledge, and values of the affected communities. The private sector and churches could also play an important role. In many ways, relocation processes on Pacific Islands are more sophisticated than those in Alaska, and the United States could learn from the Pacific experience.

This is the Summary Report of a workshop under the title of ‘Climate, Security and Peacebuilding: Challenges and Opportunities Across Scales’, hosted by the Toda Peace Institute, Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Wellington, New Zealand, on 27 and 28 October 2022. The workshop addressed challenges and opportunities across scales, from the local to the international, acknowledging that the effects of climate change generate challenges to peace and security across multiple scales and dimensions of societal life, from the everyday security of community members in rural environments to geo-political stability in regional-international contexts. This Summary Report aims to identify the key issue areas and focus on selected findings and insights from the workshop, based on the key notes, presentations and discussions in the various sessions.

This is Part II of a Policy Brief on the issues of climate change and population mobility (and immobility) in Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs). Following the outline of concepts and key considerations in Part I, this Policy Brief begins with an examination of existing and possible future origins and destinations of climate change associated mobility. Attention then turns more specifically to existing experiences and possible expectations of mobility, especially community relocation, in Oceania. It then considers the issue of immobility and draws attention to gender issues that will need to be addressed in community relocation planning and implementation.

This Policy Brief reviews the literature on climate change and human mobility, with reference to Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs). The issue of migration triggered or driven by climate change has become the focus of a massive increase in research and publications over the last decade or so. Initially it was an issue that was framed in negative terms but recently, much more nuanced understandings of the links between climate change and human population mobility have emerged. This review will briefly outline the types of environmentally influenced migration, discuss the various ‘theories’ on climate change and mobility, review the importance of land in relation to mobility in PICTs before examining historical and contemporary cases of climate change mobility. It is followed by Part II which examines existing and possible future origins and destinations of climate change associated mobility as well as the issue of immobility.