Migration Amidst Climate Rigidity Traps: Resource Politics and Social–Ecological Possibilism in Honduras and Peru

Abstract

According to dominant narratives about adaptation to climate change, those facing worst-case scenarios, without means at their disposal to adapt in situ, face an ineluctable set of adaptation strategies that ultimately includes the permanent abandonment of geographic spaces rendered uninhabitable and unproductive for human use. Yet environmental stress and adaptive capacity are distributed unevenly, and power structures play a role in fashioning them. It is argued here that when access to land and water are impacted by environmental stress, the structures that mediate their access are reinforced, even as the adaptive alternatives for smallholders are undermined. In this way, dominant resource regimes set up migration as the primary viable alternative for adaptation among a dwindling set of choices. This framework is applied to two early analogues of climate change impacts: flooded Garífuna villages of Honduras's North Coast and communities enduring glacier recession and shifting hydrologic regimes in Peru's Cordillera Blanca. In both cases, stress motivates new forms of migration that reinforce dominant power structures. In Honduras, migrants from wealthier social strata are moving on a more permanent basis, and in Peru, the once historical pattern of labor migration is becoming a practical necessity. These cases underscore the role of political economy in adaptation to climate change and adaptive migration in particular.

Adaptation to mountain cryosphere change: issues and challenges

“…GLOF events have pushed communities in Hunza (Pakistan) and Bahia Murta (Chile) to move from their villages to nearby relatives living in safe locations (Anacona et al, 2015;Ashraf, Naz, & Roohi, 2012). Multiple stressors from climate (including cryospheric) change and their implications for water availability and agriculture have forced young people from Yungay, Huaraz and Catac (Peru) and Uttarakhand (India) to migrate temporarily to cities for employment (Maikhuri et al, 2017;Wrathall et al, 2014).…”

Migration matters: How migration is critical to contemporary human–environment geography

“…Most research does not engage directly with subsequent out‐migration to trace where the displaced move, how, and with what impacts. A few studies do focus on dialectical questions of environmental claims and out‐migration, with a clear focus on migration processes (e.g., Barney, ; Elmhirst, ; McSweeney & Jokisch, ; Wrathall et al, ).…”

Livelihood resilience in the face of climate change

“…This enables us to engage directly with power relations, differentiated access to resources, and issues of inequality that might otherwise be lost in resilience approaches 13 . In particular, there are trade-offs in which the resilience of some peoples' livelihoods may result in the increased vulnerability of others' (for example, through downstream impacts of flood protection measures 14 ). These questions help to bring normative issues to the fore, and emphasize the distributional and political dimensions of the response options available to different actors 15 .…”