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Sea-level-rise impacts

Questioning inevitable migration

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 548–549 (2017)Cite this article

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It is assumed that sea-level rise due to climate change will be so severe that those living near sea level will be forced to relocate. However, new research around a series of islands that have suffered subsidence due to a recent earthquake suggests that instead, island residents remain and use a range of strategies to adapt to regular flooding.

Little did the early pioneers of climate change, environmental change and migration studies1,2 realise that their work, which predicted millions of climatically displaced people, would spawn a whole class of scholars who debate the very estimates they produced. With estimates varying from 50 milllion–200 million by 2050, these and subsequent apocalyptic predictions continue to have a high degree of traction with a wide range of policymakers. The earliest projections were based on the notion that the impacts of climate change were likely to be so great that, unable to cope, people would be forced to flee. As such, they positioned people as innately vulnerable and characterized their behaviour as largely environmentally determined. For instance, it was assumed that sea-level rise would render many settlements uninhabitable, and the projected numbers of displaced persons could be calculated by estimating the populations living within a certain proximity of sea level in the future3. However, writing in Nature Climate Change, Ma. Laurice Jamero and colleagues present evidence that challenges these assumptions: island residents faced with regular flooding prefer to remain and adopt a variety of adaptation strategies rather than resettle elsewhere4.

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  1. the University of Sussex, School of Global Studies, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QJ, East Sussex, UK

    Dominic Kniveton

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  1. Dominic Kniveton
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Correspondence to Dominic Kniveton.

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Kniveton, D. Questioning inevitable migration. Nature Clim Change 7, 548–549 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3346

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