Focus on host cities

Just as with economic migration, “fixing” the problem of climate migration by addressing its causes is time-consuming and expensive. Building a sustainable resettlement community that properly meets the needs of the people for whom it is intended is as difficult and uncertain of success regardless of which root causes are involved. Since focusing on resettlement, which is to say, focusing on the migrants themselves, has a record of poor results virtually everywhere it has been tried, the new idea is to instead focus on the cities that host internal migrant populations.

The approach makes sense. In spite of cities containing the larger part of the world’s climate-affected population, only about 10 percent of global funding for climate adaptation and mitigation goes to cities. That is unfortunate, because city governments are often more active in more direct ways with climate initiatives than national governments. City governments are in the best position to assess citizens’ actual needs — secure housing, access to basic utilities and transportation, schools, health care and other public services — and understand in specific detail what is needed to make their cities more climate-resilient. Directing funding and technical assistance at cities helps them to transform internal migrants from a public burden — which is the underlying perspective of the approach that prioritizes resettlement — into a population asset.

Plus the most practical reason for supporting the cities that host internal migrants is perhaps the simplest one; resettlement invariably means people are moving at least twice. Solving the problem of internal migration with an approach that adds a different mode of migration does not make sense, and the unsatisfactory results of years of resettlement efforts tend to confirm that.