This final report has been prepared for the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and the German Environment Agency (UBA) as part of the project “Environmental degradation, climate change and migration: Global review of research and forecasts”. It summarises the findings of three papers produced during the research project, as well as the knowledge and policy gaps identified, along with approaches and entry points for addressing them.
The first of the three papers is a review of literature on the topic of environmental migration and provides an up-to-date overview of key findings from the growing number of studies exploring the environment-migration nexus – including those examining how different forms of human mobility may support or undermine adaptation to environmental and climate change. Drawing on the literature review, the second paper, titled “Migration, environment and climate change: Impacts”, focuses on some of the key ways in which selected environmental phenomena shape human mobility. Further, it also delves into considerations of how other factors (e.g. political, economic, and demographic) come into play, providing insights to inform numerous policy areas, including climate change adaptation. Building on these two papers, the third paper focuses on policy implications and entry points for strengthening responses to human mobility in national and international climate-change adaptation policy and finance.
The authors also organised an expert workshop and an international conference during the course of the project to further develop their findings. In order to ensure a purposeful exchange with experts, the main findings from the three sub-reports were condensed into a discussion paper, which was debated during the expert workshop and the feedback incorporated back into the studies. Finally, an international conference was held to share the studies’ findings with participants from around the world (with a special focus on the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Philippines) to exchange knowledge and experiences on this subject in general.