Conversations on forced displacement in many cases still centre on the climate versus conflict dichotomy, but multiple factors often combine as triggers, requiring a more analytical approach to financing forced displacement response.

As the number of forcibly displaced people has soared, international actors have moved to emphasise the importance of climate impacts on large-scale population displacement. This is reflected within the financing mechanisms being made available for humanitarian crisis response, such as the Central Emergency Response Fund Climate Action Account and the recently launched UN Fund for responding to Loss and Damage. However, a narrow focus on climate shocks does not take into account the complexity of factors which contribute to forced displacement.

The connections between climate shocks and conflict

Some prominent advocates have positioned scaling up of climate finance within overall humanitarian budgets as a need to shift discussions on forced migration away from the sole focus of conflict-related population displacement and towards action on climate insecurity. However, this climate versus conflict paradigm is a false dichotomy. While it is true that large-scale climate shocks can contribute towards destabilising a region, regions labelled as most climate vulnerable often overlap with the most conflict vulnerable. UNHCR notes, “…almost two-thirds of all newly displaced asylum-seekers and refugees in 2022 originate[d] from 15 countries that are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.”

Climate change can exacerbate existing protection risks for displaced communities or create new ones by impacting drivers of conflict. It may result in secondary or tertiary displacement, where a community initially displaced by conflict is placed at further risk due to a climate shock. Although research has shown that direct causality cannot be drawn between conflict and climate factors, the two drivers often intersect in the dynamics of forced displacement. The weight of each on population displacement, and the way they interact, is usually context-specific and highly dependent on local dynamics.

UNHCR acknowledges this link by detailing how climate considerations might factor into a more traditional refugee status determination analysis or the need for other legal forms of international legal protection:

No special rules exist for determining refugee claims made in the context of the adverse effects of climate change and disasters. However, the assessment of claims for international protection, as conducted by national asylum authorities, should not be limited to, nor focus narrowly on the climate change event or disaster as solely or primarily natural hazards. Such a narrow focus might fail to recognize the social and political elements contributing to or being exacerbated by the effects of climate change or the impacts of disasters or their interaction with other drivers of displacement, including conflict or discrimination.

The argument for a multi-factor analysis of the triggers of displacement

In truth, climate and conflict are only two of the multiple compounding factors that influence the onset of large-scale forced displacement, albeit ones that often carry much weight in the overall analysis of underlying factors. Other factors contributing to the risk of climate-related displacement include inequality, social tensions, poor infrastructure, limited livelihoods, local access to resources, ownership of those resources, legal/political marginalisation, historical disinvestment, weak governance, and socio-economic pressures and a lack of political will to address them. As such, financing for forced displacement should move to a more multi-factor model where the weight of each factor is context-specific to how it affects local resiliency.

A multi-factor analysis of the triggers of forced displacement intuitively makes sense when looking at real-world contexts because one factor alone is often not enough to trigger long-term mass displacement. For example, a severe climate event alone does not always result in population displacement.

Case studies: how climate shocks impacted populations in India and the US

Larger-scale climate events can result in less population displacement if they affect communities with better infrastructure and economic resilience. Smaller-scale shocks can cause greater population displacement if they hit impoverished communities with poor infrastructure and limited access to livelihoods and resources. An analysis of the impacts of flooding in different areas of India demonstrates this.

Flooding in Kerala, India, in 2018, resulting from 2,346 mm of rainfall, affected 5.4 million people (of whom 1.4 million were displaced) and resulted in far more economic damage than the 2007 flooding in Bihar (corresponding to only 83 mm of rainfall), which caused less economic damage but affected 20 million people. Less economic damage in Bihar likely corresponded to lower levels of economic development before the flooding, which could also have contributed to the fact that the floods affected far more people.^[i]

Variations in the impact of climate shocks can be seen in more economically developed regions as well. In the United States, Hurricane Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall in New Orleans in 2005 and displaced over 250,000 New Orleans residents. By comparison, the stronger Category 4 Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017 and displaced only 40,000 residents. Both storms, on average, caused an estimated USD 125 billion of damage.^[ii] The disparity in displacement numbers between Katrina and Harvey is largely attributed to disaster preparedness and infrastructure, Houston had expanded flood resistance measures, including levee systems (floodbanks) and high flood walls.

Using multi-factor analysis to predict displacement

When multiple shocks overlap, with enough combined force, the resulting displacement intensifies pre-existing patterns of migration. Thus, the real driving force behind large-scale forced migration is a lack of resiliency to the combined weight of multiple factors that together affect a community’s ability to continue surviving at home. The challenge is planning ahead for the point at which factors compound enough to undermine resiliency and force people to move. Financing mechanisms need to be adjusted so that they can either mitigate or else quickly respond to the factors triggering large-scale displacement.

One way to promote multi-factor analysis is to develop predictive models that give weight to different factors within a local context (local tensions, climate vulnerability, resilient infrastructure, community-level wealth and resources, strong governance, marginalised groups, etc.) to determine the likelihood of triggering future forced displacement. Each factor can be weighted according to its importance or likelihood in each context.

Some predictive analytics models have now begun to move towards such an approach, although the weight of different factors can vary depending on the focus of the actor. For example, the fatalities002 conflict predictive model from the Violence and Impacts Early-Warning System (VIEWS) – developed by a research consortium led by Uppsala University and Peace Research Institute Oslo – utilises political context, democracy indices, development indicators and climate data among the inputs into the model. Humanitarian agencies are also adjusting their analysis; UNHCR’s Project Jetson forecasts forced displacement and the World Food Programme has a model for forecasting food insecurity. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has deployed a forecast-based financing model to allow rapid early response deployment of resources. These types of efforts or tools could be mainstreamed across all regions and levels of implementation, especially at the ground level.

Multi-factor analysis should also push humanitarian actors to work more effectively across the humanitarian-development nexus, especially if coordinated analysis could help humanitarian agencies to more effectively allocate resources and pre-position for potential disaster response. Better coordination between humanitarian and development actors could help lessen the risk of communities being displaced for a second or third time.

A way forward

A multi-factor analysis could influence the available financing for emergency response to forced displacement. Coordination and funding should be flexible enough to identify and respond to root causes, both as a preventative measure and when a crisis is triggered, in a way that prevents silos between humanitarian and development programming. Pre-existing funding mechanisms like the Central Emergency Response Fund can address this by pooling funds earmarked for humanitarian and development needs to approach displacement responses.

A second suggestion is a risk management model that integrates the multi-factor analysis framework for predicting displacement crises. Parameters such as climate vulnerability, conflict potential and other contextual factors can be expressed as standardised metrics to guide efficient resource deployment. While humanitarian emergency response funding is typically called on once mass population displacement has been triggered, allowing the use of development funds for crisis response would explicitly acknowledge the fact that poor infrastructure and limited livelihood options are themselves significant contributors to mass population displacement.

The mechanisms for such financing also matter. Some climate funds in the development sector are targeted towards for-profit business development or come in the form of loans that must be paid back and, depending on how the terms are constructed or implemented, could saddle communities with debt in a way that further impedes recovery. To this end, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have introduced debt pauses in repayment and other forgiveness processes in some such cases. Some climate-related development funds are also available in the form of grants. Canada’s climate funds for developing countries, the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery, the Global Environment Facility’s Special Climate Change Fund and the Adaptation Fund affiliated with the UN all provide grants for adaptation, mitigation and disaster risk reduction, areas of work that (in theory) also aim to address concerns of potential mass population displacement. However, grants themselves are limited and, unlike loans with favourable repayment terms, may end after the initial payment without being cycled back to provide more support in the future. Coordination between the development and humanitarian sectors is essential to determining the best solutions for each context.

While there are clear lines between the types of activities the humanitarian response sector and the international development sector should and do fund, those lines are blurring more and more as the numbers of forcibly displaced individuals worldwide grow. In this context, analysis of forced displacement, and the financing mobilised to respond to it, needs to be seen as a shared, multi-sectoral responsibility.

 

Purvi P. Patel
Visiting Fellow for Climate Displacement & Migration, Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, India
International Affairs Fellow in India, Council on Foreign Relations, USA
linkedin.com/in/purvippatel

Adithya Prakash
Research Assistant, Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, India
linkedin.com/in/adithya-prakash-a6054a217/

 

^[i] Rainfall itself is an imperfect measure, as many other factors such as topography, prior ground saturation, failure of dams and levees, etc. could also affect the onset of severe floods. However, as of now there is no standardized measure of flood severity comparable to other natural disasters such as hurricanes, typhoons and earthquakes.

^[ii] The Data Center (2016) ‘Facts for Features: Katrina Impact’ bit.ly/katrina-data

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