Effect of border policy on exposure and vulnerability to climate change

Abstract

Migration may be increasingly used as adaptation strategy to reduce populations’ exposure and vulnerability to climate change impacts. Conversely, either through lack of information about risks at destinations or as outcome of balancing those risks, people might move to locations where they are more exposed to climatic risk than at their origin locations. Climate damages, whose quantification informs understanding of societal exposure and vulnerability, are typically computed by integrated assessment models (IAMs). Yet migration is hardly included in commonly used IAMs. In this paper, we investigate how border policy, a key influence on international migration flows, affects exposure and vulnerability to climate change impacts. To this aim, we include international migration and remittance dynamics explicitly in a widely used IAM employing a gravity model and compare four scenarios of border policy. We then quantify effects of border policy on population distribution, income, exposure, and vulnerability and of CO2 emissions and temperature increase for the period 2015 to 2100 along five scenarios of future development and climate change. We find that most migrants tend to move to areas where they are less exposed and vulnerable than where they came from. Our results confirm that migration and remittances can positively contribute to climate change adaptation. Crucially, our findings imply that restrictive border policy can increase exposure and vulnerability, by trapping people in areas where they are more exposed and vulnerable than where they would otherwise migrate. These results suggest that the consequences of migration policy should play a greater part in deliberations about international climate policy.

Risk Transfer Policies Facilitate Smallholder Farmer Climate Adaptation

“…The net directional effect depends on complex interactions between the degree of climate risk, the average community risk aversion, and the degree to which financial restrictions prevent households from pursuing the Diverse and Migrate strategies prior to the manifestation of climate effects. Similar to other studies that investigate sources of immobility in the face of climate risk [8,44], we find that some individuals who would otherwise migrate in the absence of financial constraints are in fact rendered immobile by such restrictions.…”

Tracing international migration in projections of income and inequality across the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

“…Our quantification of migration patterns by SSP scenario presents a particularly useful addition to the pool of instruments aimed at the assessment of global climate and migration policy options. In particular, our projections without migration can be used as a consistent input of models combining explicit representations of migration, economic activity, and climate change (e.g., Benveniste et al 2020).…”

Spatio-Temporal Impact of Global Migration on Carbon Transfers Based on Complex Network and Stepwise Regression Analysis

“…For instance, Shi et al, (2020) adopted an integrated approach by combining a migration model and input-output analysis to quantify impacts of migrations on emissions of NOx, SO 2 , and primary PM2.5 [24]. Considering climate change impacts, Benveniste et al, (2020) additionally, included that moving populations change their level of exposure and vulnerability by using the integrated assessment models [25]. Liu et al, (2021) on the other hand used correlation analysis, combined with the multilayer perceptron neural network and stepwise regression model, to carry out the calibration of NO, CO, and CO 2 pollutants [26].…”