Floating Islands?

Motivated by the recent devastating flooding in the North of England, I wanted to briefly explore potential mitigation mechanisms. With sea level increasing, and 650 million people projected to be at risk from storm surges by 2100, attention towards this area will become ever more critical. I have previously discussed the pros and cons of migration in offering one such mitigation mechanism for these changes, but this drastic ‘worst case scenario’ solution is by no means the only option.

The IPCC proposed three strategies for flood protection in their first assessment; protection, accommodation and retreat. Protection refers to the typical hard engineering methods, such as breakwaters and sea defences. Accommodation describes a possible change in land use of areas within a coastal zone. This may dictate a change in agricultural habits, such as converting rice paddies to fish reservoirs, or changes to housing design. Retreat would regulate land use in areas considered to be vulnerable. These basic ideas have since been further developed and are represented in the diagram below.

Developed of the IPCC coastal adaptation strategy, from The Japan Academy (2013)

The latter solution has received recent support from Temmerman and Kirwan (2015), who recommends an ecosystem approach to coastal defence. It highlights the vulnerability of countries situated within vast river deltas, such as Bangkok, Shanghai and New York, to extreme flood events. They say that hard engineering approaches in these environments will become less plausible in the future due to inevitable energy price increases. Additionally, they interrupt natural delta processes, which may actually increase long term flood risk. Instead they propose that ecosystem-based engineering will provide much greater protection, with the restoration and retention of wetland environments enabling further natural land building processes. Projects of this nature have recently begun in Mississippi and the Rhine-Meuse delta. Depending on their success, more countries may look towards implementing this style of long term mitigation strategy.

The Pacific islands are even more vulnerable to rising sea levels and Anote Tong, the President of Kiribati, has recently been voicing his suggestions on how this risk could be managed. As I have mentioned previously, Kiribati are considering the role of migration within their adaptation strategy, but are also determined to maintain the island nation as a habitable entity. In his article, Tong suggests the country relocates to large floating islands, anchored to the sea. These would supposedly be able to support a population of 30,000 for a century. With reference to his slightly unusual idea, he says:

"It's radical, unprecedented, way out of the box, but in the absence of other options, unless you can come up with alternatives, I'm afraid that these are the options available to us."

Whilst this idea is no doubt unique, Tong raises an important point. The conditions we are predicted to face in the next century are unprecedented, and our current methods of adaption and mitigation may be insufficient to deal with this threat. Consequently, there is a constant demand for new and innovative ideas to reduce vulnerability to these threats which could offer a significant investment opportunity to those in the engineering industry.

Hostages of Climate Change

Whilst migration may offer a viable opportunity for some to reduce their vulnerability to environmental change, even this ‘last resort’ mechanism is not a possibility for all. These so called ‘trapped populations’ may find their ability to migrate hampered by confounding socio-political factors. One of the key factors in determining the capability of an individual to adapt to such situations is thought to be capital which, broadly speaking can be considered in six categories:

• Human Capital: the capital of persons in a household, in terms of their skills, knowledge and experience possessed
• Social Capital: the wider community networks available and also an individual’s language, accent, dialect, appearance or religion.
• Physical Capital: physical assets such as tools, machinery, cars etc.
• Natural Capital: land ownership and proximity to natural resources.
• Financial Capital: access to a bank account, capacity to borrow funds or buy insurance.
• Political Capital: access to political processes and basic human right, the extent to which they are acknowledged and provided for.

Together these determine a households’ capability to adapt, and decisions concerning the viability of migration are generally based upon capital availability. The UK Foresight report (2011) addressed the issues of trapped populations; their conceptualisation of the processes involved is depicted in the diagram below. They considered available capital to be inversely proportional to climatic change vulnerability, and directly related to the ability to move. Thus, limited capital not only heightens vulnerability to a climatic event, but also contributes to a greater level of immobility. However not all sub-categories of capital exert an equal  influence; transportation and financial capital may have a more direct bearing on the ability to move, but the presence of social networks beyond a crisis affected are would be considered an indirect capital resource.  The report summarised that environmental change is equally as likely to make migration less possible, as more probable and that that ‘trapped populations’ would be expected to become an equally as important policy concern. 

The occurrence of ‘trapped populations’ in the aftermath of recent climatic events have been discussed. Black and Collyer (2014) noted how slow onset disasters were just as likely to result in this phenomenon as sudden events, exemplified by unusual migration patterns witnessed during the Sahel droughts in the 1980s. During this period, there was a big decrease in the number of young, working age men engaging in circular migration and finding temporary employment in other countries. This is generally something that would be expected to increase rapidly at such a time, however the severity of the mass livestock loss in the hyper-arid conditions destroyed the main source of capital for the majority of people. Without stock to sell, they had no way of financing any move abroad. Thus many found themselves with no other option but to stay put.

However, these widespread and coincidental occurrences of immobility are not exclusive to poorly developed countries, with Hurricane Katrina a well-documented example Here, the widely criticised evacuation plan apparently assumed that the entire population would have access to transportation; an assumption which strongly disadvantaged the poorer, typically African American sectors within New Orleans. As Hartman (2006) discusses, a combination of inadequate disaster preparedness, structural racism and inequality, generated a catastrophe of much greater scale than it should have been. Waller (2006) poignantly notes;  ‘The difference between those who escaped with their lives and loved ones,  and those who did not, often came down to access to  a car and enough money for gas’. 

The question is; what can and be done to limit the occurrence of ‘trapped populations? Evidently, policy is incredibly important, however. it slightly contradicts the suggestions I proposed in my last post. Whilst I think it is a necessity that those who actively choose to migrate have the opportunity to do so, and in a manner which does not inflict upon their human rights, people should not feel forced into it. Additionally focussing on an adaptive strategy in the first instance should reduce the vulnerability of individual households, providing them with greater agency in making their own migratory decisions.

 

Migration as Adaptation?

There are generally three theories circulating with regards to the relationship between climate change and migration:

1. Migration as a threat. Do climate migrants have a destabilising effect on society?
2. A pending humanitarian crisis. How will we meet the needs of such vast influxes of people
3. Migration as adaptation. Can migration be considered a legitimate technique to adapt to climate change?

I have focussed primarily on the first two points of discussion, however, the final most definitely needs to be considered. This idea that mobility can be used as a method of adaptation to global environmental change is by no means a new one; early human populations are thought to have been partially guided by climatic changes. For example, the first migrations of hominin into Europe are said to have coincided with a transition to more favourably temperate conditions on the continent.

This relationship has however also been discussed with regards to more recent population displacement.  Black et al. (2011) note that there are already approximately 210 million international, and 740 million internal migrants. These movements are initiated by no single driver, but are instead the result of a complex interplay of factors, which are well summarised in the diagram below. However, they do go on to say that in the coming decades the proportion of relative influences of each of these drivers will change, with the role of environmental factors becoming even more prominent than they are now. One example of adaptive migration discussed is Bangladesh, where migration into city centres has become a regular coping mechanism to escape the effects of flooding. A study found that 16% of households affected by erosion, and 22% by tidal surge floods, moved into urban areas in 2008.  

Additionally, Mcleman and Hunter (2010) discuss previous examples where migration as adaptation may have been evident in response to Hurricane events:

Hurricane Mitch (1988): This hurricane struck central America, predominantly Honduras, displacing 2 million people. In the aftermath there was an increase in the demand for people accessing the US labour markets. Temporary Protection Status was granted to 150,000 migrants, who were given a limited term visa. This was a form of temporary migration which acted to reduce the vulnerability of those involved.  

Hurricane Katrina (2005): Following the hurricane, approximately 150,000 migrants ended up settling in Houston. The return rate to New Orleans was highly correlated to those who had a home or high income, with those who settled in Houston also tended to be young and unmarried. The experience of Vietnamese people however was also found to be very different; they had many resources supplied to them from the rest of the Vietnamese population, which acted as an informal insurance policy.

Thus, these few examples suggest that in the face of environmental change, migration may offer people an opportunity to diversify their income and build resilience. However, for it to be an effective method of adaptation, the necessary channels for voluntary migration need to be made available. There is a concern that if migrants are always thought of as being ‘victims’ it may limit their capacity to adapt, particularly in the absence of adequate policy. It can also only become an effective method with the right funding, and there are questions over how this can be generated. Catastrophe bonds and risk finance may have a very important role to play in the coming years, as may climate change adaptation funds. It will be interesting to see if any of the annual $100 billion budget that was agreed upon at COP21, is targeted towards this area.