Climate forecasts often project inevitable displacement for the inhabitants of Pacific Island States, but scenario planning shows that migration futures are not fixed and uncertainty need not be a barrier to action.

Home to 2.3 million people and spanning an area that covers roughly 15% of the earth’s surface, Pacific Island States (PIS) are on the frontline of climate change. Rising sea levels, coupled with more frequent and intense cyclones, threaten livelihoods, cultures and sovereignty. Some islands have already disappeared while others are uninhabitable after severe storms.

Governments are planning for futures where parts of their territory may no longer support human life. Kiribati has purchased land in Fiji to secure farmland.[1] Tuvalu is developing a ‘digital nation’ to preserve sovereignty and maritime rights as 95% of its land may be submerged by 2100.[2] Elsewhere, the Maldives is experimenting with artificial islands and projects in South Korea and Saudi Arabia are both exploring the potential of floating cities. These varied responses demonstrate that climate futures are not fixed, but rather a contested horizon, shaped through the entanglement of climate change, power, inequality, politics and technological possibilities.

Why forecasting falls short

Forecasting models are valuable for anticipating some migration trends, but forecasts of mobility and immobility have repeatedly been proven wrong.[3] Common limitations include linear assumptions that the future will resemble the past, reliance on proxy data from very different contexts, and a tendency to focus on factors that can be easily measured while overlooking those that are harder to quantify, such as sudden policy shifts or geopolitical conflict.[4] Simplified push-pull models can obscure the ways that migration is shaped by intertwined social, economic, political and environmental forces. Such models often fall into the trap of environmental determinism, assuming climate change will drive migration in predictable ways, when history shows that governance, conflict, and economic structures often play equal or greater roles in determining who moves, when, and why.

Scenario planning as an alternative

Scenario building offers a way of engaging with uncertainty that forecasting models cannot.[5] Instead of predicting a single ‘most likely’ future based on past trends, it generates a small set of plausible, contrasting futures by combining economic, political, social, technological and environmental factors. From military origins, it is now used by governments, corporations, and NGOs to explore uncertainty and stress-test strategies.[6]

While scenario planning is not a new concept in climate policy, its uptake has primarily been in climate adaptation and disaster risk management. Its use in climate migration research remains limited and largely experimental. Most studies continue to rely on econometric forecasting, vulnerability mapping, or case-based analysis, despite the profound uncertainties that characterise migration decisions. Recent work has begun to explore scenarios of internal climate migration in US ‘receiving cities’ and pilot exercises for planned relocation in the Pacific and Caribbean; however, such examples remain rare. Precisely because migration futures are shaped by unpredictable interactions between climate, policy and human agency, scenario planning is a valuable tool for envisaging multiple plausible migration trajectories.

Projects such as Global Migration Futures have shown that scenario planning can identify critical uncertainties, challenge linear assumptions, and reveal hidden drivers of change. Crucially, it involves affected communities, ensuring their perspectives help shape the futures being imagined. This also respects recognitional justice in which the knowledge and experiences of those being studied are centred within the research.

Scenario planning in practice

York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) held a Summer Course on Climate Migration in June 2025 which tested a simplified scenario-building process focused on the question: How might migration in, to, and from Pacific Island States look in 2050?

The workshop was held during the final two days of the five-day Summer Course, ensuring that all participants had engaged with the lectures, panel discussions, and relevant literature before the scenario planning exercise began. Background research was put together in consultation with top experts on climate migration, including practitioners with extensive field-based experience in the Pacific.

Participants first identified events that had shaped migration in the past, classifying them as either continuous trends, such as ageing or sea-level rise, or discontinuous shifts, including colonialism, decolonisation, wars and significant policy changes. The exercise revealed that discontinuous events, particularly political and policy shifts, have historically driven migration in the region. They then identified relative certainties, such as changes in tourism or demographic shifts, alongside uncertainties, including migration policy, technological innovation and shifts in public opinion. Dramatic changes like sea-level rise are inevitable and could produce different migration outcomes depending on political and social responses.

These factors were plotted on graphs to better understand their relevance, level of (un)certainty and potential impact on migration. Relative certainties were plotted with ‘acceleration’ on the Y-axis and ‘impact on migration’ on the X-axis. Acceleration was defined as the rate at which a factor changes or intensifies over time – not simply whether it is growing, but whether that growth is speeding up or slowing down. Impact on migration refers to the extent to which a factor is expected to influence migration and mobility in the future.

Relative uncertainties were plotted on a separate graph, again with ‘impact on migration’ on the X-axis, but this time with ‘uncertainty’ on the Y-axis. Highly uncertain factors were those which participants could not confidently predict would occur, or, if they did occur, what direction they might take or how their effects on migration might unfold, acknowledging that such outcomes could vary widely and remain volatile.

Participants were encouraged to debate, discuss, and share their perspectives, bringing their own disciplinary backgrounds, personal experiences and cultural frames of reference into the conversation before jointly positioning these factors on the graph. The key takeaway from this exercise was humbling: the future is far less knowable than it appears at first glance, and how different factors interact to shape migration is far more contingent, contested and uncertain than we tend to assume.

Participants developed four scenarios for migration in 2050, exploring how political, economic, social, technological, and environmental dimensions might interact and shape migration. The aim was not to predict the future, but to construct coherent and plausible stories that could reveal risks, opportunities and blind spots in current policy thinking.

Scenario examples

Workshop participants developed a range of scenarios. One group explored a future characterised by high adaptation capacity and full recognition of Pacific Island States migrants. In this scenario, while climate change impacts still occurred, investments in technology and adaptation proved effective in reducing climate related vulnerability. Additionally, the willingness of other countries to accept both permanent and seasonal migrants from the PIS fostered an environment in which circular migration, remittances and investments in the homeland contributed to economic growth and stability. Another group envisaged a scenario focused on economic growth within the PIS and the closure of migration corridors to other countries. They projected a shift toward a digital economy, diversified sources of income, and closer integration between the States. Tourism and tech startups would thrive, benefiting from favourable conditions in the PIS. Less optimistic scenarios were also considered, highlighting the challenges of a regional context marked by low economic growth and the absence of migration corridors, or by limited adaptation capacity and regional instability. While these are just a few, brief examples of the scenarios developed during the workshop, they offer valuable insight into the thinking process, complexities and challenges of attempting to peer into the future of migration and climate change.

Lessons from the process

The exercise reinforced that uncertainty is a permanent feature of migration futures and that engaging with it directly opens new possibilities. Migration outcomes in the Pacific are shaped as much by policy choices, governance and legal frameworks as by environmental change. For example, technology can shift trajectories in polarising ways by supporting adaptation and resilience or deepening inequalities.

The late activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs described the work of imagining alternative futures as both political and creative.[7] In contexts where dominant narratives frame climate-related migration as an unavoidable crisis, the practice of envisaging different possibilities becomes a form of resistance. It pushes back against fatalism, disrupts narrow policy thinking and enables Pacific Island communities and their allies to centre agency, dignity and justice in planning for what comes next.

Implications for policy and practice

Beyond reimagining futures, scenario planning offers practical utility for policy and governance. It can be embedded into National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) – which outline how countries will adapt to climate change in the medium- and long-term – and regional migration frameworks to stress-test strategies under conditions of deep uncertainty, revealing where rigid approaches may fail. For Pacific Island States, avoiding one-size-fits-all approaches is essential. While the Pacific nations share climate risks, their capacities, vulnerabilities and political contexts differ. Here, it is particularly effective in the context of planned relocation, where policy choices, financing, and community consent will interact in unpredictable ways. More broadly, it can support receiving countries and regional bodies in anticipating immigration pressures and aligning infrastructure, housing and legal frameworks accordingly.

Investing in adaptation that preserves choice is crucial. Mobility should be viewed as one adaptive strategy among many, rather than solely as a last resort or evidence of maladaptation. This requires integrating migration planning into national climate policies, ensuring it is resourced, rights-based, and grounded in community priorities and needs. International actors can support more coherent and just approaches by creating migration pathways that recognise sovereignty, dignity and agency, and by aligning resources with the visions of the communities most affected, rather than solely with donor priorities.

Building new narratives

Before the workshop, many participants imagined the future of the Pacific in apocalyptic terms: submerged islands, stateless populations and inevitable displacement. Scenario building disrupted that narrative. One of the most profound realisations to emerge from this process was that uncertainty, rather than foreclosing the future, can make it brighter. By engaging with multiple plausible futures, it became clear that migration outcomes are not fixed but contingent, shaped by policy choices, technological innovation and political struggle. In the case of climate migration, this point highlights that political factors and choices drive climate-induced displacement, contradicting the prevailing scholarship and narratives that view climate change as an environmental inevitability.

In this reframing, the future ceases to be a linear path leading toward disappearance and becomes instead a space of possibility. What initially appeared as an inescapable crisis opened into a horizon of action, where communities, governments and institutions can shape more just and adaptive responses. Instead of diminishing our sense of agency, embracing uncertainty expanded it: we have far more capacity to act – and to reimagine the future – than we often allow ourselves to believe. Yet, this gives us not only hope but also responsibility: if the future is open, we will be held accountable for how it unfolds. The fate of these island states and their populations will depend on the choices made today and whether agency is mobilised to turn possibilities into action.

Vittorio Bruni
DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford
vittorio.bruni@gtc.ox.ac.uk
linkedin.com/in/vittorio-bruni-32a72a202/

Yvonne Su
Associate Professor, York University and Visiting Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
yvonnesu@yorku.ca
linkedin.com/in/yvonnesu/

The authors would like to thank the 2025 Centre for Refugee Studies Summer Course participants for their contribution to development of this article. For a full list, visit https://www.yorku.ca/crs/imagining/

[1] Hermann E and Kempf W (2017) ‘Climate change and the imagining of migration: Emerging discourses on Kiribati’s land purchase in Fiji’, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol 29 (2): 231-63

[2] Rothe D, Boas I, Farbotko C and Kitara T (2024) ‘Digital Tuvalu: state sovereignty in a world of climate loss’, International Affairs, Vol 100 (4): 1491-1509

[3] For instance, researchers failed to forecast the net migration rate in the UK following the inclusion of A10 countries, and more recent forecasting models failed to predict Brexit or COVID-19.

[4] Ramirez R, Mukherjee M, Vezzoli S and Kramer A M (2015) ‘Scenarios as a scholarly methodology to produce “interesting research”’, Futures, Vol 71: 70-87

[5] De Haas H, Vargas-Silva C and Vezzoli S (2010) Global Migration Futures: A conceptual and methodological framework for research and analysis, International Migration Institute

[6] Vezzoli S, Bonfiglio A and De Haas H (2017) Global migration futures: Exploring the future of international migration with a scenario methodology

[7] Boggs, Grace Lee (2011) The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, University of California Press

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