National Workshop on Migration and Global Environmental Change in India

The Summary Report is a synthesis of the presentations and discussions that took place during the National Workshop on Migration and Global Environmental Change in India, organized by UNESCO, with the support of the Government Office for Science, United Kingdom, and the Department for International Development (DFID), in March 2014, to examine the relevance in the Indian context of the international study titled Migration and Global Environmental Change (Foresight, 2011).

The Summary Report documents existing research on anticipated impacts of global environmental change on population mobility in India and South Asia, and advance knowledge on the need to incorporate migration influenced by global environmental change, both internal and international, into planning.

Indian economy is inextricably tied to climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, which are already facing multiple stresses, and global environmental change could further exacerbate these stresses. Migration and especially internal migration, is already a challenging question and the current discourse does not adequately address pertinent issues such as seasonal and circular migration, portability of rights and social entitlements, lack of formal residency rights, lack of identity proof, lack of political representation, low-paid, insecure or hazardous work and extreme vulnerability of women and children to trafficking and sex exploitation. Global environmental change could aggravate the situation.

By focusing solely on the population that might leave vulnerable areas, the report stresses that we risk neglecting those that will be ‘trapped’ and those that will actually move towards danger and vulnerable areas. Development policies will be better able to deliver if they take account of the links between global environmental change and migration, as well as recognize that migration can be part of the solution.