Climate Change
and Migration
Four manifestations, five drivers, two-axis scenarios — and the political infrastructure actively dismantling them. A graphic organizer of the field, and of what the assigned literature cannot account for.
What the Readings Cannot Know
A compact timeline of publication dates against ground-truth events. The three assigned readings predate every event below the axis. The framework they assume operates inside an institutional landscape that has since been dismantled.
The cluster of yellow and orange dots in the final twelve months of the axis marks a categorical shift — not in the empirical drivers of climate-related mobility, but in the political infrastructure assumed by every recommendation in the literature. Each of the three readings is internally coherent. None can address the actor-collapse and frame-reversal that occurred after publication.
Master Concept Map
Six conceptual layers. Each adds a modulator on the one above. The final layer is what the assigned literature cannot see.
Manifestations
What climate-related human movement looks like on the ground. The IPCC AR6 WGII identifies four canonical categories that overlap across two axes: agency (voluntary ↔ forced) and motion (moving ↔ staying).
Why this matters
Each category contains the others in latent form. A household’s adaptive seasonal migration becomes involuntary when conditions cross a threshold. Planned relocation produces immobility for those who refuse to move. People classified as trapped often have adaptive strategies that aid agencies fail to see.
Regional predominance
| Region | Predominant form |
|---|---|
| Asia-Pacific | Involuntary displacement (cyclones, monsoons) |
| Pacific atolls | Planned relocation |
| Sahel | Adaptive (seasonal labor) |
| Bangladesh | Adaptive + involuntary (rural→urban) |
| Dryland Africa | Immobility (trapped) |
| C. America | Cross-border adaptive turning involuntary |
| US Gulf / LA | Planned (Isle de Jean Charles) |
| Mekong Delta | Planned + adaptive |
Mechanisms
The causal pathways that translate climate change into mobility decisions. The Foresight (2011) framework resolves the older “environmental refugee” determinism: climate change rarely acts alone — it modifies five interacting driver categories.
Direct mechanisms
- Sudden-onset — cyclones, floods, wildfires, storm surges (IDMC: 225M+ internal disaster displacements in Asia-Pacific 2010–21)
- Slow-onset — SLR inundation; chronic drought; saltwater intrusion rendering land unusable
Indirect mechanisms
- Livelihood erosion — yield decline, fisheries collapse, water scarcity reduce income, prompting migration as economic adaptation
- Food insecurity + price shocks — harvest failure cascades into urban food prices
- Conflict mediation — resource scarcity intersects with weak governance (Syria, Sahel debates remain contested)
- Health system stress — vector-borne disease range shifts, heat morbidity
- Maladaptation — dams, sea walls, “green grabbing” displace populations even pre-impact
Regional dominant pathways
Likelihood
How confident the literature is in different claims, and how wide projection ranges are. The field has moved away from headline “X million by Y” figures toward probabilistic, scenario-conditional projections — because outcomes depend heavily on policy choices.
Confidence matrix (IPCC AR6 WGII)
| Claim | IPCC confidence |
|---|---|
| Climate hazards are a growing driver of involuntary migration and displacement | High |
| Causal link between extreme weather and mortality, morbidity, food/waterborne disease | Very high |
| SIDS disproportionately affected relative to population size | Very high |
| Climate-induced displacement is generating and perpetuating vulnerability | High |
| Direct climate → conflict causal pathway (e.g. Syria/drought) | Contested / mixed |
| Specific quantitative cross-border projections | Low |
| Tipping-point migration (AMOC slowdown, Amazon dieback) | Low confidence, high consequence |
| Reducing future risks possible through cooperative international efforts | Medium (preconditions now contested — see Panel 05) |
Projection range: internal climate migrants by 2050
Scenarios
Outcomes are not fixed. They depend on the interaction of emissions trajectory and development pathway. Groundswell II uses three illustrative scenarios that map onto SSP/RCP-style framings — the same two-axis logic the IPCC uses for climate futures.
Response inputs that modulate the outcome
- Mitigation — cutting emissions to limit hazard exposure (Paris-aligned targets)
- Adaptation — reducing vulnerability, increasing local options (livelihood diversification, social protection)
- Development — inclusive growth, governance, gender equity
- Anticipatory action — forecast-based financing, planned relocation, ex-ante humanitarian
Scenario flow
The Groundswell scenarios are constructed within a Northern-donor, state-stability paradigm. They project numbers to be managed, not rights to be honored. The same projection figure functions very differently when invoked by Frontex, USAID, or a Pacific climate-justice coalition. — framing extending Duffield (2007), de Waal (2018), Lancet CHH Commission (2024)
The Undoing
What the four assigned dimensions cannot register: a distinct fifth layer of active counter-mechanisms operating on every node above. The assigned readings model a system being asked to adapt. The system has, since publication, been re-tasked to do something else.
Geographic atlas — three undoings, one map
The three inversions
Three distinct dismantlements, operating concurrently, that the assigned literature cannot register because they post-date publication and contradict the literature’s core operating assumptions.
| DIMENSION | USAID COLLAPSE | REMIGRATION FRAME | 3RD-COUNTRY DEPORTATION |
|---|---|---|---|
| Key date | Jan 20 → Jul 1, 2025 | Feb 2025 — Dec 2025 | Through 2025; ongoing |
| Mechanism | EO foreign-aid freeze; 82–90% of programs terminated; agency dissolved; replaced by $11B “America First Global Health Strategy” | Mainstreaming of ethnonationalist removal as policy vocabulary across 10+ Northern states | Negotiated transfer of asylum-seekers to states with no prior tie to the deportee; ~27 agreements |
| Effect on framework | Removes the largest single implementing actor for “adaptive migration” interventions | Inverts the donor frame: from “manage flows” to “expel populations” | Inverts the direction of forced movement: toward, not away from, exposure |
| Reading silent | All three (predate dissolution) | All three (predate mainstreaming) | All three (predate Lyons / Las Americas litigation) |
Three structural reasons the readings cannot reach the present
01 — Unit of analysis. The literature frames climate-induced movement as a humanitarian problem requiring development response. The dominant frame in 2025–26 is ethnonationalist threat requiring removal. Same population, opposite policy verb. Ferris (2020) anticipates contested terminology; she does not anticipate that “climate migrant” would become a category targeted for active expulsion by the states most responsible for the emissions producing it.
02 — Implementing actor. Mechler et al. (2018), the Foresight inheritance, and Groundswell II all presuppose a working development-aid architecture — bilateral programs, multilateral funds, in-country implementing partners. USAID’s dissolution (July 1, 2025) removed a $51.6B-a-year line of that architecture. The “comprehensive risk management” toolkit at the center of Mechler et al. now has nobody to execute it at scale in the most exposed regions.
03 — Direction of movement. Groundswell II projects 44M–216M internal migrants by 2050, moving largely away from climate-exposed origins toward viable destinations. Third-country deportation networks route people the opposite way: from the donor states (where livability is constructed) to El Salvador’s CECOT, South Sudan, Eswatini, Uzbekistan, Libya. Anti-adaptive migration, produced by policy. Groundswell’s projection math holds; its political economy assumption does not.
The pattern lines up with what the Transborder Protection & Resilience Network concept note (MSHA-520, 2026) identifies as the central analytical move required: treating the deportation pipeline as a slow-onset, policy-driven disaster system. Once that move is made, the four assigned dimensions read coherently — Manifestations include forced involuntary outflows from donor states; Mechanisms include policy as a hazard accelerator; Likelihood folds in legal-status precarity; Scenarios admit a sixth quadrant the original 2×2 cannot draw. — extending the literature, not refusing it
What the four panels add up to
The climate-migration nexus, read through the assigned literature, is a system of manifestations, mechanisms, likelihoods, and scenarios. Read against ground truth in 2026, it is also a system being actively contained: its predicted flows are now political liabilities that donor states are reorganizing themselves to refuse. The dominant Northern-donor humanitarian model, as Duffield (2007), de Waal (2018), Fassin (2011), and the Lancet CHH Commission (2024) have argued in different registers, was never purely a response to suffering. The 2025–26 inflection makes that legible at the level of policy vocabulary: the same projection figure invoked at Frontex headquarters and at a Pacific climate-justice coalition is doing entirely different political work. A graphic organizer that maps the four assigned dimensions without naming the fifth — the containment apparatus operating on every node above — describes the field at a moment that no longer exists.
This artifact is a research deliverable.
References
APA 7th edition. Three required readings listed first, in italics; supporting and ground-truth sources follow alphabetically.
Clement, V., Rigaud, K. K., de Sherbinin, A., Jones, B., Adamo, S., Schewe, J., Sadiq, N., & Shabahat, E. (2021). Groundswell Part 2: Acting on internal climate migration. World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/36248
Ferris, E. (2020). Research on climate change and migration: Where are we and where are we going? Migration Studies, 8(4), 612–625. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnaa028
Mechler, R., Bouwer, L. M., Schinko, T., Surminski, S., & Linnerooth-Bayer, J. (Eds.). (2018). Loss and damage from climate change: Concepts, methods and policy options. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72026-5
— — —
de Waal, A. (2018). Mass starvation: The history and future of famine. Polity Press.
Duffield, M. (2007). Development, security and unending war: Governing the world of peoples. Polity Press.
European Council on Refugees and Exiles. (2026). Asylum policy tracker. https://ecre.org/
Fassin, D. (2011). Humanitarian reason: A moral history of the present (R. Gomme, Trans.). University of California Press.
Foresight. (2011). Migration and global environmental change: Final project report. UK Government Office for Science.
Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. (2026). Remigration tracker. https://globalextremism.org/
IPCC. (2022). Climate change 2022: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability [H.-O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E. S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, & B. Rama, Eds.]. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844
KFF. (2026). USAID timeline: A chronology of dissolution. https://www.kff.org/
Martin, A., & Prysner, M. (Directors). (2025). Earth’s greatest enemy [Film]. Empire Files.
Migration Policy Institute. (2025). Third-country deportation agreements: 2025 review. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/
Oxfam International. (2025). Humanitarian collapse zones following USAID dissolution. https://www.oxfam.org/
Romanello, M., Walawender, M., Hsu, S.-C., Moskeland, A., Palmeiro-Silva, Y., Scamman, D., Ali, Z., Ameli, N., Angelova, D., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., Basart, S., Beagley, J., Beggs, P. J., Blanco-Villafuerte, L., Cai, W., Callaghan, M., Campbell-Lendrum, D., Chambers, J., Chicmana-Zapata, V., … Costello, A. (2024). The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change. The Lancet, 404(10465), 1847–1896. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01822-1
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, November 28). Press release on third-country removal procedures. https://www.dhs.gov/