As Climate Change Compounds Difficulties for Many Returned Migrants and Their Origin Countries, “Green” Reintegration Approaches Face Obstacles
WASHINGTON, DC — The reintegration challenges that returned migrants typically confront, including finding work and accessing basic services, are compounded in areas where slow- and rapid-onset climate events are negatively affecting livelihoods, housing supply and community dynamics. With many of the low- and middle-income countries that receive returnees experiencing some of the harshest impacts of climate change, the issue of “green” approaches to reintegration is getting some attention.
Returnees often settle in areas affected by disasters and environmental degradation and their countries of origin may have the fewest resources to prepare and adapt to climate change. These factors can undermine migrants’ ability to re-establish themselves after return, as a new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) issue brief explains.
Even as some policymakers and practitioners are increasingly exploring green approaches to providing reintegration assistance in ways that are responsive to environmental and climate considerations, only a few such initiatives, typically small in scale, have been rolled out to date. These include community-based projects to build climate-resilient infrastructure and support entrepreneurship in green sectors such as solar energy and waste management.
In Green Reintegration: Supporting Returning Migrants in Climate-Affected Communities, analysts Camille Le Coz and Ravenna Sohst note that limited interest and funding by donors who often prioritize other aspects of reintegration assistance represent a major obstacle to the expansion of green reintegration. On an operational level, green pilot projects have also faced challenges related to their narrow focus on economic reintegration, limited in-house technical expertise on climate issues and gender dynamics (e.g., biases that may disadvantage women entrepreneurs in green sectors).
The brief outlines a series of strategies that policymakers and practitioners can use to make reintegration assistance more responsive to climate change. Among them: Raising awareness among people in areas of return about the value of environmentally sensitive practices, forming alliances with climate-focused actors to tap into new sources of funding and expertise, and tailoring green reintegration initiatives to specific local contexts.
“These strategies hold the potential to pave the way toward more durable practices in the area of reintegration,” the authors conclude. “Such actions would help improve how reintegration projects address the wide range of issues that are becoming more pressing as climate impacts intensify in the regions to which migrants return.”
The brief accompanies an earlier publication, Linking Migrant Reintegration Assistance and Development Goals, that maps existing approaches to connecting reintegration projects with development goals and offers recommendations to overcome their limitations.
These issue briefs result from a partnership between MPI and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Read today’s issue brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/green-reintegration-migrants.
And for prior MPI-GIZ work, see a series on Critical Migration Governance Issues in a Changed World, which looks at implementation issues around the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and Towards a Global Compact for Migration: A Development Perspective, meant to inform compact negotiations and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
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The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank in Washington, DC dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at local, national and international levels.