Climate change effects on people’s livelihood

Generally climate is defined as the long-term average weather conditions of a particular place, region, or the world. Key climate variables include surface conditions such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) broadly defined climate change as any change in the state of climate which persists for extended periods, usually for decades or longer (Allwood et al. 2014). Climate change may occur due to nature’s both internal and external processes. External process involves anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and volcanic eruptions. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) made a distinction between climate change attributable to human contribution to atmospheric composition and natural climate variability. In its Article 1, the UNFCCC defines climate change as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (United Nations 1992, p. 7)

Perceptions of Environmental Change and Migration Decisions

While climate change is projected to increase displacement of people, knowledge on this issue remains limited and fragmented. In his paper we focus on the micro-level and study the effects of individual perceptions of different types of environmental events (i.e., sudden/short-term vs. slow-onset/long-term) on migration decisions. Our results based on newly collected micro-level survey data from Vietnam shows that while slow-onset environmental events, such as droughs, significantly decrease the likelihood of migration, short-term events, such as floods, are positively related to migration, although not in a statistically significant way. When contrasting individual level perceptions with actual climatic events we observe that migrants and non-migrants perceive both long-term as well as sudden-onset environmental events in different ways. While non-migrants are slightly better in judging the actual extremeness of events such as floods and hurricanes, it is the migrants who are slightly better in judging the actual extremeness in the case of droughts

Internal Displacement Due to Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean

Environmental disasters have been identified as a significant cause of human mobility. Particularly in developing regions, climate change is responsible for rising the frequency and intensity of weather-related disasters in the last decades, thus increasing the number of people who migrate within their countries. This chapter examines the magnitude and duration of internal displacements due to disasters in 18 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean between 2013 and 2015, and analyzes the quality of the Global Internal Displacement Database. Overall, 505 events of disaster were identified, which led to the internal migration of 4,217,737 people. The mean of displaced persons per event was 8351 (SD = 69,755) and the mean duration of the displacement was 11.9 (SD = 40.5) days. The primary reason for internal displacement in the countries examined was hydro-meteorological disaster related to climate change (51%). Results conclude that the Global Internal Displacement Database accurately identifies the starting date of internal displacements, but presents limitations to measure the duration of the displacements during the reference period