The dominant story about climate change and human movement is, by now, well-worn and familiar: a warming planet will drive growing numbers of people from their homes, producing waves of "climate migrants" or "climate refugees." It is an intuitive narrative and a discursively powerful one. It is also, in many important respects, misleading.

As research on climate change and migration has ballooned over the last decade, this narrative has matured past its earliest framings. Scholars have largely set aside the image of climate refugees in favour of a more careful formulation: "migration in a changing climate." This shift acknowledges the complexity of different kinds of migration that occur from climate-stressed contexts. But it carries its own risk — to a general observer it can unintentionally collapse into the assumption that all migration in a changing climate is climate migration.

Field Research · Wayisso, Ethiopia

My research in Wayisso, a farming community in Ethiopia's Rift Valley, suggests that adopting a systems-oriented approach to the study of migration and environmental change may be one way to answer that question. My fieldwork coincided with the aftermath of a severe drought triggered by failed rains in 2015 and 2016, which allowed me to study how migration responds to an acute environmental stress. What I found was surprising: those who migrated during the drought were, on the whole, the least affected by it. Those who were the most directly affected and the most vulnerable did not move at all.

The clearest way to explain why is to follow three young people through the same failed rains.

These are three very different (im)mobility outcomes from the same drought in the same village. What I would like to emphasise is that the environmental shock alone explains none of them very well. To understand why the same failed rains coincided with one person's return home, a second's international labour migration, and a third's deepening "involuntary immobility," you have to look past the weather to the social and economic structures the drought acted upon and within.

Theoretical Frameworks

This is the ambition of more systems-oriented approaches to the study of migration. Two analytical traditions in migration studies may be especially helpful for scholars of migration and environmental change:

How do these theories help make sense of the three outcomes from Wayisso? Mobility transition theory helps explain why young people in Wayisso wanted to leave in the first place — and it has little to do with the weather. A growing, increasingly young and educated rural population, raised to expect more than a life of farming, had been turning away from agriculture well before the rains failed. The drought did not create these aspirations; rather, it further undermined their realisation.

Migration systems theory, in turn, helps explain the one departure: the young woman reached Beirut because a gendered international labour market and an established migrant network were in place to finance and facilitate a move her own household could not have afforded. The young men did not have access to this same gendered migration system.

Implications for Policy

Researchers are now well aware that climate change does not act on inert populations. It acts on communities already shaped by long-standing and newly emerging migration systems. Mapping the migration systems and developmental dynamics already at work in a place may allow scholars to better disentangle which mobilities and immobilities are most, and least, directly exposed to environmental stress — and through what mechanisms.

That in turn can support policymakers working on climate adaptation planning to identify and reach the most vulnerable — those for whom the question is not where they will go, but whether they can move at all. This is the harder question waiting on the other side of "migration in a changing climate." Systems approaches are one way to take it up, and to come out the other side of complexity with something more precise to say.