Displacement and Resettlement: Understanding the Role of Climate Change in Contemporary Migration

How do we understand displacement and resettlement in the context of climate change? This chapter outlines challenges and debates in the literature connecting climate change to the growing global flow of people. We begin with an outline of the literature on environmental migration, specifically the definitions, measurements, and forms of environmental migration. The discussion then moves to challenges in the reception of migrants, treating the current scholarship on migrant resettlement. We detail a selection of cases in which the environment plays a role in the displacement of a population, including sea level rise in Pacific Island States, cyclonic storms in Bangladesh, and desertification in West Africa, as well as the role of deforestation in South America’s Southern Cone as a driver of both climate change and migration. We outline examples of each, highlighting the complex set of losses and damages incurred by populations in each case

The Brazilian Cerrado is becoming hotter and drier

The Brazilian Cerrado is a global biodiversity hotspot with notoriously high rates of native vegetation suppression and wildfires over the past three decades. As a result, climate change can already be detected at both local and regional scales. In this study, we used three different approaches based on independent datasets to investigate possible changes in the daytime and nighttime temperature and air humidity between the peak of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy season in the Brazilian Cerrado. Additionally, we evaluated the tendency of dew point depression, considering it as a proxy to assess impacts on biodiversity. Monthly increases of 2.2−4.0℃ in the maximum temperatures and 2.4−2.8℃ in the minimum temperatures between 1961 and 2019 were recorded, supported by all analyzed datasets which included direct observations, remote sensing, and modeling data. The warming raised the vapor pressure deficit, and although we recorded an upward trend in absolute humidity, relative humidity has reduced by ~15%. If these tendencies are maintained, gradual air warming will make nightly cooling insufficient to reach the dew point in the early hours of the night. Therefore, it will progressively reduce both the amount and duration of nocturnal dewfall, which is the main source of water for numerous plants and animal species of the Brazilian Cerrado during the dry season. Through several examples, we hypothesize that these climate changes can have a high impact on biodiversity and potentially cause ecosystems to collapse. We emphasize that the effects of temperature and humidity on Cerrado ecosystems cannot be neglected and should be further explored from a land use perspective