The paper “Climate Change, Migration and Conflict: Receiving Communities under Pressure?”analyzes the likely intersections between climate change, migration and conflict. The paper identifies some of the most relevant factors that might turn environmentally induced migration into a source of conflict and hold major implications for receiving areas.

Scientific literature is still inconclusive about the conflict potential of environ­mentally induced in-migration and the mechanisms potentially linking it to conflict onset. In general, such mecha­nisms tend to apply more often in cases of conflict induced as opposed to environmentally induced migration. In a possible chain of events leading from environmentally induced migration to conflict in a receiving area, a host of other factors comes into play, including the causes and type of migration and responses to and perceptions of migra­tion. The impacts of current and future climate trends are likely to increase the pressures that trigger environmen­tally induced distress migration and migration as a means of adaptation to environmental change. At the same time, climatic and non-climatic factors further strain governance capacities and weaken the stability and the natu­ral resource base of receiving commu­nities, thus making it harder for them to respond to migration appropriately.

The authors appeal to governments and donors to invest in (a) extending the knowledge base, for instance by conducting long-term case studies, and (b) supporting mechanisms for receiving communities in devising migration governance strategies based on this knowledge.