Policy Briefs

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.