Composition of population is often affected by migration
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Migration is one of the variety of ways by which human populations adapt to environmental changes. The study of migration in the context of anthropogenic climate change is often approached using the concept of vulnerability and its key functional elements: exposure, system sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. This article explores the interaction of climate change and vulnerability through review of case studies of dry-season migration in the West African Sahel, hurricane-related population displacements in the Caribbean basin, winter migration of ‘snowbirds’ to the US Sun-belt, and 1930s drought migration on the North American Great Plains. These examples are then used as analogues for identifying general causal, temporal, and spatial dimensions of climate migration, along with potential considerations for policy-making and future research needs.
With the rise of scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change, increasingly detailed scientific inquiries have been made into potential future climatic influences on global migration patterns.1–8 Environmental changes, of which climate variability and change represent one set of examples, have long been recognized as having the potential to influence human migration and settlement patterns. However, migration outcomes rarely emerge in a simple stimulus-response fashion, but are instead modified and shaped by the interaction of environmental changes or events with human social, economic, and cultural processes.6,9 In the field of climate change research, interactions between climate and migration are increasingly situated within the context of human vulnerability to climate change, which is in turn identified as being a function of exposure to the impacts of climate change, the sensitivity of communities or socioeconomic systems to such impacts, and the capacity of those exposed to adapt.10
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