Climate Security and Migration

Dec 11, 2015 | Center for New American Security
Washington, DC
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This event will explore questions of how the United States, in collaboration with foreign partners, multilateral institutions, and civil society, should tackle future climate migration. What are the key initiatives, institutions and challenges involved in successfully addressing climate migration? Does the issue of climate migration fit our current framework and processes for dealing with migration? What should the international community be doing now?

International leaders and the climate community will focus attention and efforts on the Conference of the Parties (COP) as it gets underway in December in Paris. Regardless of the agreement that comes out of the COP, pressing climate-related issues will become increasingly severe and manifest in issues such as migration that policy leaders will need to address in the near and mid-term. Potential mass migration events in the future will have global and local implications from governance, policy, technical, legal and financial perspectives, and may feature a climate or weather nexus in managing the causes and consequences of migration. The events over the summer and fall in Europe, albeit not due to climate change, were illustrative of the scale of the challenges involved for policymakers and security leaders. Climatic change will add another layer to the challenges the global community will face in addressing migration, including explicitly climate change-driven migration, in the years ahead.

It is against this backdrop that CNAS is convening this event to bring together perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the ways in which members of the international community can partner together to address the impacts of climate change and migration.