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Environmental Change and Human Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa

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People on the Move in a Changing Climate

Part of the book series: Global Migration Issues ((IOMS,volume 2))

Abstract

Writing on environmental change and migration has, for a long time, decried the dearth of empirical work on the subject. Contrary to such claims however sub-Saharan Africa is a region in which there is both significant historical evidence of mobility serving as a means to address environmental stress and is also home to a number of studies looking at the linkages between environmental stress and human mobility. While such studies and accounts have tended to focus on the impact of slow onset stresses, such as drought and desertification, the sub-continent also experiences significant exposure to rapid onset stresses, such as flooding and storm surge. This chapter offers a review of over 30 studies which document historical mobility responses to environmental stress in sub-Saharan Africa and synthesise attempts at modelling the environment-migration nexus. This review is contextualised in an overview of the impacts predicted likely to accompany climate change in the different regions of the continent, as well as an account of the main, current internal and international migration flows in the region. The conclusions of the review are that mobility forms an important response to environmental change and stress, but it is also an established strategy and only one of a potential host of livelihood options. Importantly, the existing studies also highlight how migration is more than the outcome of poverty or intolerable vulnerability, instead appearing to manifest as a highly strategic response to which significant barriers operate. As such, mobility appears to be a highly context-specific response, which is shaped by a host of institutions operating at a variety of scales. The review thus suggests that much of what is revealed by work on the environment-migration nexus is consonant with findings on migration trends more broadly in the region.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that the description “moving in a context of environmental stress” is used in an attempt to supersede simplistic accounts of, and debates over, the degree to which environmental stress may or may not “cause” migration.

  2. 2.

    Reduced vegetative cover, which is expected with the conversion of land, is thought likely to intensify this temperature increase.

  3. 3.

    Scenarios mentioned in this text refer to the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2000).

  4. 4.

    Despite not being a part of the focus of this chapter, Central Africa is included here because the delineation of different regions of the subcontinent is not consistent among different studies. In this case, the study was aggregating data from the Western and Central African region.

  5. 5.

    The population between Luanda and Rabat is expected to rise from 21 million to 51 million by the end of the century.

  6. 6.

    Note that Ezra (2001) suggested that part of this dynamic could have been the increasingly small land holdings in Ethiopia, which were reducing the number of children that people were wanting to have.

  7. 7.

    The description of the situation in the Dogon regions is from the time of writing of the study by de Bruijn and van Dijk.

  8. 8.

    The value of these studies is that they may reveal an ecological component of mobility, even though the environment is never truly static. In addition, such studies may be revealing of an environmental component in migration as they highlight how environmental stress has different implications for mobility when it occurs in well-endowed, as opposed to marginal, environments.

  9. 9.

    By “first decision” the authors mean the first decision made by an individual living in the place of their birth to leave that area.

  10. 10.

    For the period 1970 to 1999.

  11. 11.

    Note that this account is referring to the “recent troubles” in 2003, not 2011. Given the date of Shimeles’ (2010) paper, this situation may no longer be the case.

Abbreviations

IOM:

International Organization for Migration

IPCC:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

NDVI:

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International Development, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    James Morrissey

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  1. James Morrissey
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Correspondence to James Morrissey .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geography, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Etienne Piguet

  2. Migration Research Division, International Organization for Migration, Geneva 19, Switzerland

    Frank Laczko

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Morrissey, J. (2014). Environmental Change and Human Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa. In: Piguet, E., Laczko, F. (eds) People on the Move in a Changing Climate. Global Migration Issues, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6985-4_4

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