Climate migration is driven by, and places demand on ecological, infrastructure, and social resilience. We build on previous research by our team members on the factors that have shaped Puerto Ricans’ decisions to migrate after Hurricane María and the implications for their well-being. We also draw on our team's expertise in transnational migration, gender, and human rights in conflict contexts. For example, the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population (a largely Muslim minority in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar) is a significant challenge for the increasing climate crisis in the region. Millions of individuals have been forced to flee their homeland, with over 950,000 Rohingya seeking refuge in neighboring Bangladesh - among the top 10 most climate-vulnerable countries in the world (Eckstein, Künzel, Schäfer, 2021). This case illustrates the tangle of political, economic, and environmental factors that make it difficult to directly attribute migration to climate hazards, even when they are in play.

 

The questions we explore include: How do coupled human-environmental dynamics respond to unequal distributions of socio-economic resources? In what ways and to what extent do such dynamics drive climate migration? How does community-level resilience shape individual-level migration decisions in the face of climate impacts?