Policy Briefs on Climate Change and Conflict

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.

This Policy Brief aims to fill existing research gaps and discuss the temporal and thematic evolution of confidence levels in WGII's climate security reporting. Since AR4, the IPCC has been assigning a level of scientific uncertainty to each substantive statement in its reports. Using a novel application of natural language processing, this study was able to assess IPCC confidence levels in climate security literature over time and across topics. The study finds that more scholarship does not automatically lead to more robust evidence and that while the IPCC has a strong bias toward reporting findings with medium to high confidence levels, the under-representation of low confidence findings is somewhat problematic. The Policy Brief concludes with recommendations for researchers and practitioners.

Part II of this two-part study explores the ways in which a combination of ontological security and the spatial turn with a genuinely Pacific approach can contribute to theoretically explaining and practically addressing the challenges of climate change-induced mobility to peace and security in the Pacific region. The focus will be on the fundamental land/people connection and on its implications for ontological (in)security in the face of relocation and displacement. Finally, some conclusions will be drawn and recommendations for further research, policy and practice will be given.