 Thank you very much for joining us everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are around the world. It's my pleasure to open this World Migration Report webinar. My name is Marie McCullough and I head up the Migration Research and Publications Division at IOM and also I'm the editor of the World Migration Report series. As you may know, the World Migration Report is IOM's flagship publication and it's the Global Reference Report on Migration and Displacement Globally. It's IOM's main contribution to strengthening the global evidence based on migration and migrants worldwide, including to support states in policy formulation and review processes and also in combating misinformation on migration and migrants. We're also finding through the years that IOM's World Migration Report is increasingly used for teaching both at the tertiary level and increasingly at the secondary level as well. As you may know, it's published every two years in the latest edition. The World Migration Report 2022 was launched last year late last year by our Director-General at IOM Council, which is our annual general meeting. We organized the first virtual event on the WMR late last year with our Deputy Director-General for Operations. We've got Chee Daniels and we've also looked at global trends. We have delved into in previous webinars the Regional Chapter as well, Chapter 3 on Regional Migration Developments and Dimensions. We have also looked at Chapter 4, which is looking at Migration Research and Analysis and UN contributions. We took a deep dive into UN contributions. As part of this series, we're now moving into the first of the thematic chapters. What we do in Part 2 with the World Migration Report is look at complex and emerging migration issues. I think today's webinar certainly is not an emerging issue. It is a very complex issue and we're really delighted to have speakers and discussants with us today to share their knowledge and their insights and thoughts. You may know that there's a range of digital tools that we have recently developed, such as the, well, now multi-award winning World Migration Report interactive platform. I would encourage people to have a look at the interactive platform. We work with some of the best database experts in the world on this, as well as an interactive, new interactive educators toolkit. And of course, these webinars also are part of our really our obligation in terms of disseminating knowledge on migration and migrants globally. And it indeed, it is critical to communicate research and analysis beyond the research community to a diverse and a growing audience, given the salience of international migration and displacement. And I'm really pleased to see we've got a number of different people, colleagues who we work with, as well as policy officials, practitioners, private sector participants, and of course, quite a few researchers I noticed today on the line. Thanks so much for joining us. Having just had the World Environment Day on Sunday, and of course, the first day, the opening day of the Bon Climate Change Conference being yesterday. Today's webinar will focus on Chapter 9 of this edition of the World Migration Report, which is titled, Migration and the Slow Onset Impacts of Climate Change, Taking Stock and Taking Action. The chapter was authored by Mariam Treor Chasnoel, together with Alex Randall, and they will both be presenting today. Thanks very much for joining us, Mariam and Alex. We really appreciate it. And also for the chapter too, of course, as we know, the issue of migration environment and climate change is a priority for IOM and it has been for some time. In fact, the oldest publication available on IOM's online publications platform is actually on the topic of environmentally induced population displacements and environmental impacts resulting from mass migration. Sounds fairly recent, but in actual fact, it was based on an international symposium that took place in April 1996. Migration and climate change continues to be a key institutional priority to this very day. And last year, our Director-General appointed Ambassador Caroline Dumas to the new position of DG Special Envoy on Climate Action. And of course, there have been many, many research and policy publications produced since the 1996 International Symposium Report, including a chapter in the previous edition of the World Migration Report, the 2020 edition, which looked at human mobility and adaptation to environmental change. Undoubtedly, the very high salience of the topic requires that more will be produced, including in the context of an increasingly uncertain world. What we do know, however, is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects climate change to increase displacement into the future. And of course, we already know that this is a reality for many people around the world, particularly in regards to internal displacement. Between 2008 and 2021, for example, droughts and extreme temperatures caused more than 3.5 million new displacements and planned relocation of communities due to slow onset degradation already taking place in over 60 countries and territories around the world, some sobering figures. Before passing the floor to today's speakers, just a quick reminder that the webinar is recorded and we will be posting this on our website for people to access, just as the previous ones have been posted, if you're interested in looking at global trends or regional dimensions or the UN contributions on migration, research and analysis. And in the interest of time, questions will be kept for the Q&A session after the presentation and the discussants have made their remarks. But please do feel free to post questions anytime in the chat function. So without further ado, please let me pass the floor to my colleague, Mariam, who is Senior Policy Officer in IOM's Department of Policy Research and was previously part of IOM's Migration Environment and Climate Change Division. Mariam, the floor is yours. Over to you. Thanks. Thank you, Mary. Thank you. Hello, everyone. It's such a great pleasure to be here and to discuss this chapter that Alex and I wrote. We started writing it a couple of years ago. So I mean, Mary, as you said, climate change and migration, it's no longer an emerging issue. It's clearly an issue that has emerged. But I think with the more emergence we see and the more complex we realize that the topic is that there's so many layers to the ways that climate impacts the way people move that we are. I personally feel we're starting to unpacking even more of this complexity. For many years in the past, there's been a lot of really good research done, a lot of good thinking around what kind of policy responses could be developed to respond to environmental and climate migration. But I feel that the more we talk about the topic and the more we realize how complicated it is and how many dimensions are coming together. That's also why we did this chapter specifically on slow onset. When we think of climate change and migration, if you look at the media, for instance, there is often the tendency to think of people moving linked to disasters, to extreme events that happen and displaced a lot of people. But what are going to tell us, the one working on the ground, is that they are seeing more and more people moving because of slow changes in the environment. I'm going to start sharing my screen now and we'll keep this presentation very short because I have a cover and we have great discussions. So I'll try to keep it short. Let me put the presentation. I hope it works. I'm sorry. I need to put it on the full screen. Sorry for that. So just as a reminder for the sake of this discussion, we're using IOM's definition of climate change, of environmental migration, which is a very large definition. There's a lot of discussions around how we should cool people moving because of climate impacts. We're not going to solve this discussion in this presentation, but for the sake of this talk today, we'll use environmental migration. So in the chapter, we're looking at different ways that slow onset changes in the environment interact with the movement of people. And this is kind of a summary of the main issues that we have seen. Some of the points on this slide are related specifically to slow onset movements. Movements lead to slow onset changes, but some of them are also applicable to environmental migration at large. So essentially, I would say that in terms of thinking of policy making to address the negative impacts of climate change and migration, one of the most complicated but one of the clearest issue is that people move in different ways in relation to slow onset changes in the environment. They might move, they might look like they're forced to move, let's say when there is a drought, but they can also look like they are choosing to move. And this is quite complicated, for instance, when we think of the connection with labor migration or economic reasons for people to migrate very often. And I think here specifically to have a study that our colleagues from the UN Convention to Combat Disadvocation did, very often it is difficult to distinguish what the climate, the weight of climate change and environmental degradation in the decisions to migrate. So for instance, in the case of the study, Moroccan migrants were saying, oh, we're moving primarily for economic reasons, but if you were discussing a bit more with them, the survey made clear that these economic reasons were linked to impacts of climate change on their livelihoods. So sometimes it is evident that people are moving because of a change in the environment, but other times it is hidden behind more of an economic reason, driver of migration. Another interesting dimension which is linked to slow and set events, it's the connection with conflict, peace and security. So this is something that as IOM we actually want to explore further because the literature can be quite inconclusive at that time. I think it's so far, there is widespread agreement that changes in the climate do not necessarily lead to increased conflict, but we're also seeing that in some regions this intercommunity conflict is centered around the availability of natural resources. So this is something that needs to be also thought about in terms of policy responses. Another important point is the question of urban moving from rural to urban areas. So because slow changes in the environment very often impact the very livelihood of rural people, for instance who work in agriculture, fishery and so on, many of them tend to move to nearby cities as opposed to international migration or moving across border. So we have numerous examples, for instance in Mongolia, of large numbers of people moving from rural to urban areas, but again this is another dimension that we have as a priority institutionally because we think that more work could be done on that. So very quickly in terms in the chapter we are looking at some of the data related to slow and set events and the impacts it has on the movement of people. I mean there's a lot in there, you can check it out. I would say that the key thing to remember here is that we do not have complete data but we have enough data points to know that we simply cannot afford to wait any longer in terms of policy responses and we also have an idea of the kind of movements that take place, whatever they're taking place and what are they linked to. So of course there's always a case to be made for more complete data, more accurate data, more analysis, clearly this is needed for policy making, but we cannot use the lack of data as an excuse let's say to not take action now. A link to that, I think it's also important to think of the question of projections. I'm sure that in this audience here you probably have a whole herd of some work done around the number of people who could be migrating because of climate impacts including slow changes in the environment. We're talking about several dozens of millions of people across the world potentially on the move so I think clearly the data is telling us that we need to act right now and this obviously also means working on policy responses. So to give that policy discussions there's been quite a number of work done on the question of migration and climate change in many different policy frameworks at the global, at the regional, at the national level. So again because climate and migration it's no longer an emerging issue but it's an issue that has emerged. There we have about 10-15 years of global and regional policy discussions on the topic. Some of them have been more influential than others to shape the global discourse. So for instance we have all the work done under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As you mentioned Mary this week is the beginning of one of the annual climate conferences that takes place in Bonn and these occasions are always of the opportunity to plead for more consideration of migration issues in the discussions that take place under the global climate negotiations. But having said that there is already a work stream under the UNFCCC which is linked to something called the Task Force on Displacement. What's interesting here is that this Task Force on Displacement a few years ago produced recommendations on what states could do to address the impacts of climate change on the movement of people and this text is slowly but surely being adopted. I mean being let's say it inspires national policy development for instance in countries like Kyrgyzstan. Azerbaijan has been some policy analyses made by the government to figure out whether the national policy frameworks are adequate to support the implementation of the recommendation of this Task Force on Displacement. And of course the global compact for safety and regular migration is another major source of guidance. The 2018 document that was adopted by states did acknowledge that states needed to address drivers environmental and climate drivers of migration but also that more regular migration pathways would be needed for those unable to return to areas which were impacted by climate change. So what is interesting here is that in the recent a few weeks ago we had the International Migration Review Forum, the IMRF and again this question of flexibility and availability of regular migration pathways was discussed and it was included in the progress declaration that were adopted by the states who attended the conference. So I would like to say that there are many many ways in which policy responses can address some of the most negative impacts of climate change on the movement of people including when this movement takes place in the context of slow changes in the environment but what is maybe interesting for us as well as the migration agency is to think of this question of regular migration pathways and what it means for national policymakers especially to work on this dimension. So I'll stop very shortly. I just wanted to highlight that the chapter also has an analysis of some of these decisions that migration policymakers especially at the national level could be taking to respond to environmental migration. These kind of decisions would be in line with the text that we just mentioned the GCM and the task force and displacement recommendations. So in a way it would be I think in the future it would be like a great step forward would be to see more national policy frameworks revised or tweaked or developed to actually try to implement these global guidance that we have into national policy making and with this I stop because it's been 10 minutes and I give a from a bit to Alex because he's the co-author of this chapter and he has other perspective on the topic. Thank you so much. Thank you very much indeed Mariam as you have highlighted there especially in your last slide there are opportunities in terms of policy responses and policy action and as also the chapter goes into there are some really great examples around some of the initiatives and the policy frameworks that have been implemented. Now let me turn to Alex Randall and Alex is the program manager at Climate and Migration the Climate and Migration Coalition and he really brought to life in the chapter the impacts in terms of migrants and migrants voices to bring it to life you know we do deal with data we do with research and policy but sometimes it's very good and we try to do this in the World Migration Report through different mechanisms to bring to life some of the impacts on migrants and migrants community so Alex I will hand over to you and you can take us through your particular very interesting contribution in regards to migrants voices. Alex over to you thanks. Thanks everyone thanks to the organisers and of course thanks to Mariam the co-author on this chapter and thank you for the introduction. I was brought into this chapter to do something quite specific and that was to exactly as Marie has said try and bring some life to the content and the way that we did that was to use a series of testimonies from people who are on the move from migrants from people who've been displaced and talking about their own experience and specifically talking about the ways in which climate change and changes to the environment had shaped their mobility so literally people in their own words describing the story of their movement journey that they've taken and focusing on the ways in which droughts rainfall variability disasters of different kinds heatwaves sea level rise had shaped their movement and were part of their story of migration and what we wanted to do was rather than simply just presenting these testimonies and saying here they are what we wanted to do was connect the stories that these migrants displaced ease and refugees are told with the data and the analysis that was in the chapter and we felt that was really important these shouldn't just be testimonies people's experiences standing alone disconnected from what we were trying to say in the report chapter we really wanted to show that the evidence that has come from decades of research on this is in fact also rooted in people's experiences people's day to day experiences often difficult often traumatic are actually a reflection of the data and the evidence that have been collected over the years so we were really keen to show that connection bring that data to life and kind of ground this chapter as far as we could in in the reality of of what people are actually experiencing when they have an environmental or a climate change dimension to their mobility and what I wanted to do with this with my with my few minutes here is just share with you one particular testimony that really stuck out for me we we gathered about six or seven I think for the for the chapter but there's one that I just keep coming back to and it's a testimony that was collected a number of years ago by a group of researchers working in Mexico so I should add these aren't testimonies that we gathered specifically for this report they are testimonies that that we've been kind of connecting and bringing together over over years from other researchers and other sources but there's this there's one particular testimony that I keep coming back to and we used it in this chapter and I I use it in lots of presentations because I think it just reveals so much about the connection between climate change and human mobility so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to share my screen I'm going to show you the testimony and I'm then I'm going to kind of walk us through how we use these testimonies to illustrate some of the points that are made in the report so if you will bear with me just for a second I'm going to share my screen and show my slides so hopefully you can see my screen and I'll just give you a moment to to read that testimony to yourselves just a few seconds just to digest it and what I want to do now is just pull out a few key things from this testimony which I think demonstrate some really really key points about the connections between climate change and human mobility and points that have been touched on already and I'm sure we will return to in our conversation the first one is about droughts and rainfall variability and what we can see from this testimony is that drought rainfall variability are so often part of the picture when people move when people migrate but what I think we can see that's really important here is it's not straightforwardly just a lack of rainfall that is driving this person's mobility it is a change in the pattern of rainfall it doesn't have to be an extreme drought it doesn't have to be a persistent multi-year drought in fact relatively subtle changes in when rain falls can make the difference between a successful year for a farm and an unproductive year for a farm and then from that shape whether someone needs to migrate whether they need to move in order to protect their livelihood because of that rainfall variability and I think that's a really key point we aren't necessarily talking about extreme droughts it doesn't necessarily take the most severe or most catastrophic droughts that we've ever seen to reshape patterns of mobility in a particular area it only takes variability to potentially shift and alter those patterns of where people can and can't find a livelihood the second thing that I think is really really interesting in this testimony is clearly the person here is talking about engaging in a pattern of seasonal and circular migration and I think in the media we are very often presented with a view an image of climate link mobility that sees this movement as being permanent that people will go on a one-way journey from their current location to a new location where they will settle and live forever but actually a lot of the evidence that we have points to people using migration using mobility as a way of shoring up their livelihood as a livelihood strategy and when they do that they very often don't migrate permanently people move initially perhaps during a period of drought and then return perhaps when the drought alleviates people very often migrate during the quieter parts of the agricultural calendar to find work elsewhere and then return during the busier parts of the agricultural calendar as a way of shoring up their livelihood so I think although it is certainly the case that perhaps in the future as the more severe the more extreme impacts of climate change take hold perhaps if the mitigation strategies that the world is currently working on are not as successful as we might hope of course it may be that many people do move permanently and there are people who are moving permanently now but we should also remember that at the moment many people are engaging in this pattern of seasonal and circular migration as a way of securing a livelihood for themselves finally what we can see here is a really clear example of climate linked mobility looking much more like economic migration and I think this is a really important thing to understand the ways in which climate change reshapes patterns of migration is so often via the economy and then via the labour market what we can see here from this person's experience is that the driving force behind their migration or part of the driving force behind their migration is looking to secure an income their income has been eroded by the rainfall variability that their area has experienced so it may be that many of the people who have an environmental or specifically slow onset climate change dimension to their movement would in fact describe themselves would describe their own experience as being one which is more like economic migration it may be that they are counted when it comes to the statistics as migrants moving to find work rather than people moving due to the slow onset impacts of climate change so I think that's a really important point for us to remember just because someone doesn't immediately define themselves as being a quote climate change migrant or having a very obvious climate or environmental dimension to their mobility does not necessarily mean that within their story within their experience and within the drivers of their movement there may in fact be a climate change dimension the reason that I keep coming back to this testimony the reason that I think it's so interesting is because to me it really tells us something about the complexity of the issue what we can see here is someone who is moving in a seasonal and circular way they're not moving in a straightforward one-way migration pattern they're moving because of rainfall variability they're moving even though the rainfall variability hasn't completely decimated the agricultural area that they are from and and and finally they are describing their own mobility as being existing at this nexus between the environment and the economy and the labour market and I think that shows us so many important things about how these issues are connected so I'm going to unshare my screen now and I think I've just about used up my 10 minutes is that right right thank you very much Alex and yeah thank you for thank you for your time taking us and and yeah and stepping us through that certainly when researchers but also program managers working on migration around the world you might be working in an embassy you might be running a visa program in particular kind of type of visa it's very interesting when people tell their stories they're not thinking in policy categories they're not thinking about whether they would fall into you know environmental displacement or whether they would fall into a kind of slow onset impact climate change type of scenario people are just telling their stories telling their lives stories and how they are adapting and adjusting and that's one thing that I think resonates when you're working in migration practice delivering programmatic responses delivering operational responses including of course in humanitarian and displacement context but also in visa programming and and Alex has just highlighted that beautifully in terms of understanding then what those connections are to policy and the policy responses and the policy officials around the world who then have to grapple with not just individual stories and testimonies but how to deal with issues at scale and as a policymaker that's often a real challenge because anybody can come up with a bespoke response but when you start to see issues change in terms of migration patterns and processes at scale that's when you get into some of the so-called wicked problems in migration and some of the real challenges especially in regards to rights of migrants and and protection with a small p protection let me turn to felicitous our first discussant we're really delighted of course to be joined by two discussants as well as the authors who can really offer their insights as experts in this particular topic and of course the first discussant today who will be speaking is felicitous hillman who's a professor at the institute for urban and regional planning at the technical university in berlin and is herself a specialist in this area and is able to provide some real insights from her experiences I'll hand over to felicitous now for your remarks thank you very much thank you meli thank you everyone welcome everybody I'm delighted to be here and to comment on this marvelous report so thank you for the opportunity I'm going to share my slides here oh my goodness could you open the slide I said I just sent you excuse me sure I think we will ask adrian if you wouldn't mind sharing your screen I'm sorry I it's a big file it looks great thank you but maybe that's the issue that's fine if you just could open it that's fine so the report is much needed as it raises awareness about the complexities of migration mobility and human development we speak about so-called wicked problems and now we said so a moment ago could you just please open the excuse me I cannot see that that's fine can you see my slides now yes yes perfect thanks so the central aim of the word migration report is to set out in clear and accurate terms and I quote here the changes occurring in migration and mobility globally it has an obligation to demystify the complexity of human mobility the report brings innovative and long overdue aspects into the debate the lottery of birth for example a passport index the role of visa regimes and this goes together a lot with climate change the report develops a global perspective and it points the report also points to the pros and cons of academic and non-academic research it sees intergovernmental research as a main producer of knowledge by now so in my comment I would like to speak in the view of an academic chapter nine deals with the impact of slow onset processes of climate change on migration to include this chapter was wise decision it is of great value despite this I feel it goes still a little bit too little beyond the notion of the management of migration here I see some potentials to fulfill the aim of the report as it says in its introduction the chapter outlines the ambiguity of migration to be defined either as a loss and damage as written down in the cancun agreement or migration as a normal adaptation strategy it underlines the rural urban divide its main message is about the need of planned relocation policies that could also be critical in facilitating safe and orderly migration I feel we even need another type of knowledge here to come to grips with the complexities of migration four years ago in 2018 we did interviews with the guinean with the evil diaspora to find out what the role of the diaspora is in the context of climate change and what narrations are transmitted by the diaspora to the place of origin and the place of origin here was the gulf of guinea so listen to that person in one way or the other one can say also environmental change also has to do with international migration because environmental change affects the people also in the city not only in the villages when there are no jobs there's nothing happening in the country everybody wants to leave there is no easy access to use water there's no easy access to electricity everything is completely down the farmlands are not good the water bodies are not producing enough fish because there are too many people going to the same water every day and then discussing a bit more diving deeper into the into the world of this person or those persons they said overviews and profit seeking became part of the explanation listen to that person so foreign investors are into business and their main aim is to make a profit they started to do salt mining throughout the whole year so whether the salt the water level goes down or not they will they have means of getting their salt and that is what is affecting the local people at the moment I think they are even dwelling underground to get the salt and it's affecting the water system so the biggest structure speaking about climate change means speaking about the tip of the iceberg what we will see in the next years is the melting of the iceberg and all of the embedded problems with problems of slow onset events popping up just a few thoughts I want to present here we have seen for many years sorry sorry felicitous yeah sorry just a second apologies the screen was a bit stuck on this side on my screen it works excuse me no because we're sharing on my side I'm sorry about that it froze for a bit here okay which slide are you on currently um just jump over the two with a quote go ahead please because I see my slides sorry about that yeah okay then the next one next go to the next please yeah okay perfect so three thoughts I think we have seen for many years business models prevailing that or that dominate our economies which are difficult concerning environmental change so we have industrialized agricultural systems and we have little acceptance of traditional knowledge and long-term sustainable ways of thinking so think of the loss of biodiversity for example there are many cases of such man-made degradations deforestation early extraction many more some of them such as such as the setting up of infrastructures such as seedy fences dams and polarization are known to shift the problems rather than to solving them so and sometimes these big structures are even legitimized with climate change for example rising sea levels I think we must focus much more on the impact of such infrastructural changes and the role of man-made um environmental change for in and out migration so we must go beyond the broad scope of climate change but much much more into environmental change second point we must explain also that different types of mobility and this is said in the beginning of the report are entangled with each other and that they came with that they come with a different price tag regarding the climate I wish there would be more discussion on resource consuming forms of mobility in the global north also such as cruise tourism for example and instead of discussing the mobility of vulnerable people in the global south so I see there's an imbalance and we must think of shifting the focus of the debate also to the consequences of our consumeristic lifestyle which is associated with mobilities the expectation towards mobilities my third point Greta Thunberg says she wants us to panic now we see that people start to migrate internally due to slow onset climate change processes and will even will do so even more by the year 2050 however when creating an appropriate response panic is not a good advisor the report mentions that we have little data on migration and climate change this is true but it's also true that we need to look much more to focus much more on the dynamics and this is what mariama just mariam just said before the report please go ahead once one further please no way to go so the report also highlights the human development and peace nexus as inspired by the SDGs and related to migration I think this is exactly the way to go to focus on the dynamics to look on peace fragility migration and development as an ensemble as an assemblage and the preservation of knowledge that we need about sustainable development there must be must more more long term more local and more contextualized approaches to master the challenges of climate change it is less about big technological solutions but about small scale human and environmentally friendly action including migration as an adaptation strategy even though the authors mentioned that there are too many um too too many long term projects with generally little geographical coverage I think we must go to this long term understanding of the patterns of recorded movements and the world of academia is see here to come up with new connections to make connections visible and to think independently from hasty policy needs so there is no longer an excuse to take action this is true but we need also new connections in what we look at that would be my comment to this chapter thank you so much thank you very much Felicitas and you've traversed actually quite a lot of the report there not just the chapter including you know the environmental transformations that we talk about along with the big geopolitical transformations and the technological transformations in chapter one the report overview with a signal to looking at you know what is on the horizon and what we're likely to be seeing in terms of complex and emerging issues you're quite right of course in terms of looking at new connections and new forms of migration and mobility and what they mean in terms of climate change but as Mariam said and I wholeheartedly agree with this including as a former policymaker you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater as we would say in Australia and utilizing the very rich and growing evidence base for understanding what the future dynamics look like looking at the current looking at the current situation and the past and those long-term trends why do a historical research and analysis when you can actually draw on a wealth of information and so that particular area in terms of climate change I would love to say that we don't need to be dealing with it in the next edition of the world migration report the 2024 edition the unfortunate reality is that we will have to again cover climate change and migration but we will again be looking at a specific segment of it we can't just cover migration and climate change it's way too big so we have looked at human mobility and adaptation and we have looked at the slow onset impacts because again it's just too big and complex to be able to chew off on a very very large topic such as migration and climate change impacts I'll now turn we thanks to Felicitas will now turn to Robert McClellan and of course Robert is one of the world's leading experts of course in this particular area and has worked across policy and research so he has a deep knowledge of course in both worlds Robert is currently a professor in the department of geography and environmental studies he's a teacher he's a researcher again as I mentioned he's also a policymaker previously and he's at Wilfred Laurier University I think we'll have Robert's bio in the chat as well so I will now hand over to Robert for his remarks and thanks very much and thanks IOM for having me at this great event to launch a really important resource I think that it was mentioned earlier that a lot of folks use this as a teaching and learning tool and I certainly do so it's a wonderful report and thank you very much for the opportunity to comment on this particular chapter congratulations to Meriam and Alex for their hard work on this I think they've done a really nice job trying to distill a really complex set of issues into a readable format yet it's yet at the still at the same time maintain the technical accuracy that we want to see as well from the perspective of researchers and policymakers so well done a few thoughts then I don't have any slides so I'm afraid you have to look at my my mug for the next few minutes but I'll try to keep it short and try to bridge into some Q&A and discussion and some things that I've seen pop up in the chat so far I'd like to focus on the the slower emerging risks associated with climate change I was actively involved in the writing of chapter seven of the working group to report by the intergovernmental panel on climate change and we did a deep dive into the risks associated both currently and in the future the risks associated with climate change both in terms of sudden onset events but also longer term risks and Alex in his examples was talking for example about changing precipitation regimes which is which is a big one and I like the fact that he focused on it doesn't take much in terms of a subtle change to a system to throw that system out of balance so agricultural systems are geared very closely to particular particular growing conditions and even the change of a few weeks in terms of timing of precipitation or volume of precipitation and they have huge direct impacts on people who are in their livelihoods and also the indirect impacts as as we're seeing right now with food prices around the world obviously being affected by the conflict in Ukraine right now but even a small perturbation caused by climate to food production systems in an exporting region whether it's the prairies of Canada whether it's the grain fields in Australia even a small perturbation can cause rippling consequences for people all around the world and I'm afraid we're going to see more and more of this in coming years rising temperatures just generally that threshold starts to move up and up and we're seeing this already in South Asia parts of Southern Europe where ambient temperatures are becoming so hot it's difficult to conduct work it's difficult to simply stay cool and as we move into this hotter future this becomes a reality is that some places will become very difficult to inhabit and these habitability risks are often urban environments the very places where rural people are moving to are becoming more and more challenging places to live and in those rural areas not only do we have the impacts in agricultural systems we have you know longer fire seasons which is becoming a greater risk for displacement so there's a whole bunch of stuff that's going on in my own country last year in British Columbia in the mountains the temperatures reached nearly 50 degrees Celsius that's Arabian desert temperatures in the mountains of western North America fires broke out over 500 people lost their lives we're already seeing these sorts of impacts and of course coming over the horizon very quickly are things related to sea level rise and I personally am working with a group in a community called Taktayaktuk in northern Canada where the plans are being made to relocate that community because the location of the community is untenable in the next 25 to 30 years because of rising sea levels and the increased risk of floods and erosion and so on so these are not hypothetical risks these are these are real and actual and the report does a nice job of sort of summarizing some of the key ones and Alex's quote I'm going to come back to that in a moment really captured some of this I like how the report functions focuses on multi causality because it's very rare that you know climate change itself is the driver of migration I mean certainly we get sudden onset events like a hurricane comes and knocks down all the houses and people are displaced okay we can see there's a climatic driver but often it's more part and parcel of a variety of challenges that households have to cope with and sometimes that mix of environmental social economic and political challenges causes people to decide okay I need to move at this point in time so that's really important and I encourage folks to to look closely at what Alex and Miriam have done in the chapter on that the multi dimensionality of the impacts of climate change slower onset events is super important the impacts on housing on infrastructure on health on employment opportunities labor markets and so on so it's not just a clear you know here's a here's a climate risk and here's a an outcome it's often intertangled with one another and those impacts can have different scales of impacts it can be a very localized displacement it can be a wider scale challenge to habitability and it can have different temporal scales it can have seasonal risk permanent risks and so on and so as a result the outcomes can often be multi-scaler and as Alex mentioned mentioned sometimes it leads to temporary migration temporary displacement return sometimes part of the household moves part of the household stays behind other times you get permanent you get local movements you get international movements as well and this is where we get into the context of adaptation that felicitous was talking about because migration and mobility more generally needs to increasingly be viewed within the context of adaptation to climate change and obviously adaptation is itself contingent on the wealth of households the wealth of communities the wealth of governments it depends upon institutional capacity and governance mechanisms and so on and there's increasingly linkages to health and health system adaptation as well and if you just think about for example access to cooling access to high quality housing these become part and parcel of these development trajectories where our longer-term development in rural areas in urban areas needs to be more climate resilient and so within that context migration and mobility is important the question becomes how do we make migration effective in terms of adaptation how do we make it something that I should back up and say I'm very biased in this respect I'm pro-migration my wife is an immigrant my mom's an immigrant so you know where I'm coming from when I say migration is a good thing but it's a good thing only when people have agency that's when they're able to move legally they're able to move with some degree of freedom they're able to integrate into labor markets of their generation they're able to remit money home when those conditions are in place and Maryam picked up on this when she talked about for example the compact on safe and orderly migration when those conditions are in place migration can be a very successful way of helping adaptation not just for the migrants themselves but for the sending community and for the the receiving communities as well and of course what we're seeing at a global scale is sort of a pushback from governments on two scales one is on the international scale governments are increasingly trying to restrict and prevent mobility and migration and obviously that works completely counter to to making migration and mobility more more successful as an adaptation and internally within countries we see policy makers seeing adaptation as a means of preventing people from moving within their countries and again that is not the trajectory we want to see it we want to see within a broader holistic climate resilience set of pathways Alex's example of I think it was a person from Mexico who goes to Wyoming each year to work for a few months and to bring home income to their family the key question is is that individual legally able to do so do they have worker protections when they're in Wyoming do they have access to safe housing safe labor conditions are they moving legally so that they're not having to pay smugglers or to dodge immigration authorities and so on because that same act of moving from Mexico to Wyoming and back to earn money depending on the conditions under which it happens it can benefit everybody or it can increase the risks to everybody involved and so that's something that we need to think about so my final point is on the client on the policy challenges and I saw there was a question in the chat about this what can we do I think what governments need to do is they need to walk and chew gum at the same time it's to look at climate change and migration and sustainable development not as little silos to be tackled by different ministries and and bureaucrats but to be integrated into thinking about how can we make all of these work collectively in a policy framework that advances sustainable development and the chapter does a great job showing what our different policy mechanisms are to achieving that and so hopefully I'll hand this back to the organizers hopefully this tease up a little bit of discussion in the remaining moments thank you thank you very much indeed Robert and I think we also hear a lot about you know working across different silos and different ministries within within governments and that is challenging to be to be frank in my experience it can be very very challenging to work like that within governments however what I would say is given that migration and climate change and climate change more broadly is one of the global issues of our time prioritising those connections within governments and also regionally sub regionally and also globally I think is is the point one of the key points of the chapter and one of the key points in including it in the context of the World Migration Report and continuing the discussion and the dialogue through various mechanisms including IMRF amongst many others so we might not be able to sort of break down those silos and work across different governments on a whole range of issues but I think everybody's in agreement that this is probably the one issue that we really do need to focus on most definitely for especially for our children and our grandchildren and our unborn great grandchildren sort of futures and so forth we do have a few questions in the chat we are almost out of time but what I would ask our authors and our discussants if it is okay with you if we go a little bit over time the attendees have very keenly put in questions in the chat so I would like to really ask particularly the authors in the first instance the first question is about policy and so particularly for Mariam if you would like to handle that I know you can see it also in the chat there but I'll just repeat this for people who are online a lot has been said about policymakers having to respond but the complex is very the topic is very complex what are the in terms of the big question is how should policies be framed what should policies look like thank you Mariam thank you so much I think Robert mentioned quite a few points there but I think listening to this discussion and I was looking at the question I was trying to you know to think of something we need to respond to but then I was thinking it's such a difficult question it is because everything is related to something else as you said we need policymakers to work together but we also have examples in some countries of specific policies on climate change and migration so there's so many things that could be happening in terms of policy discussions to respond to these questions having said that both respondents also mentioned the question of political will of states and political sensitivities so from that perspective I think there's a limit to what can be done in terms of policy responses and that limit is probably around something Robert mentioned which is admitting more more migrants having said that I don't think this is an excuse to not discuss regular pathways for people affected by climate impacts I think it's clear that this is something that where countries can take like concrete action whether it's developing labor migration agreements whether it's implementing regular legislation program there's a lot that can concretely be done but also from a particular perspective and that also goes back to the second question which is what can we do to address internal migration well clearly there's a lot of focus on addressing the drivers the climate and environmental drivers of migration so people don't move which is not always detrimental when the people do not want to move but can become a problem if people want to move so what does it mean in terms of policy responses it's basically taking into account the migration dimensions the movement mobility dimensions of existing climate change mitigation and adaptation measures amplify the work already done in the hope that this kind of mitigation adaptation work will reduce migration but if I may say it's in theory and ideally it should only be reducing forced migration people who don't want to move and that necessarily keep people in place over thank you very much Maryam I'll hand over to Alex very conscious of time and and Alex's kind of key point really in terms of policy is listening to people thinking about their stories their impacts and what that then translates to in terms of policy frameworks and policy responses which is a bit of kind of mental gymnastics often including when you're working in policy environments because you have a range of disparate and sometimes conflicting information and evidence that you have to take into account so let me hand over to Alex and more broadly not just on the chapter Alex but from your experience I'm sure that you've got some very rich insights to share yeah thank you and thank you to our questioner as well um yeah it's a really great question and I think one of the key things that I think it's important to understand about the way a lot of policymakers approach this question is very often they they approach it with the wrong question right they come to it saying what policies if they're on board if they're if they're kind of interested what policies do we need to deal with climate link migration and displacement and in a lot of ways frustrating as it is that's very often the wrong question because what I think our chapter demonstrated is that it's very difficult to isolate one group of people and say here is here is a group who are moving exclusively because of climate change impacts and they can be categorized and they're likely to be moving from A to B at this date and these are likely to be their needs and this is the migratory route that is that they're likely to take right that just isn't how it works you've got people moving for all all kinds of like complex reasons of which climate changes is a backdrop or it's in the mix and I think what that entails is creating um my creating policies which protect all migrants which protect all people who are on the move right which don't necessarily isolate or try to isolate people moving because of the impacts of climate change now that doesn't mean that policymakers can then just go okay great well there's nothing we need to do you've just told me that this isn't you know a policy area that we can actually meaningfully create policy on what I think it means is that the policymakers need to step back kind of one one step and say what does it look like to protect all migrants all refugees and all people on the move in an era of climate change I think that's the way to approach approach this policy question thank you very much Alex and that is increasingly um being asked uh in a range of different forums as uh as Mariam certainly pointed out earlier I would like to just quickly hand over to Felicitas and then to Robert for any final remarks we have got other questions in the chat but they are much more specific to geographic location so I think I will just go to Felicitas and Robert yeah just thank you thank you so much for this very inspiring webinar for this great chapter and yeah thank you for presenting this use to me to us thank you so much thank you Robert over to you any further briefly yeah thanks again so much like Felicitas in terms of those who are asking policy related questions uh in the chat I guess I would encourage you to encourage the people you work with or the policymakers you have influence over to to ask them when they start to think about migration whether it's just migration policy generally or migration policy in the context of environmental change to start with the question how can we make this work better for everyone involved if they start from that departure point I think then the the the policy pathways are more promising than if you say hold on a sec this is something we're kind of worried about how do we prevent this from happening I mean the root cause if you want to prevent climate migration from happening uh you know cut back on your greenhouse gas emissions that's the ultimate uh policy decision but apart from that on the migration side of things just ask how can we make this work for everyone thanks everyone thank you very much indeed Robert uh any last thoughts Maryam or Alex just want to make sure that you are able to cover all the issues that you want to cover um there's just a such a rich discussion every time I'm listening to a webinar about climate and migration in general it we always realize that there's so much more to the issue than what we started discussing in the first place so I'm sure there's a lot more that could be said but I think we have covered some of the other main points and thank you so much Mary it was really a pleasure to be here thank you Maryam and I would encourage people to go and read the chapter um that Maryam and Alex have put together for us for the world migration report any last final comments from you Alex just want to give you a chance just to extend my thanks to obviously um Maryam our co-author and the discussants and to IOM for putting together the event that's been a pleasure to meet you all thanks so much and sorry we didn't get to all of the questions we are way over time and special thanks to our authors Maryam and Alex and also to Robert and Felicitas we've really appreciated your inputs today and we will as we said we're recording this so we will be posting the webinar including with our tech problems apologies for that um onto our web page shortly and we'll certainly be able to send out the link to everybody who's who's been involved thanks again and hopefully people online will be able to join us for the next world migration report webinar thanks again bye