Supporting migration as a response to climate risk: precarity, adaptive capacity, and well-being dimensions

Human migration is a prevalent and widely used strategy to deal with emerging risks from climate and environmental change. Yet the reality of migration and its consequences are underrepresented in policies and interventions for adaptation. We outline a framework that proposes relevant normative dimensions to support evaluation of migration-as-adaptation in terms of what makes it successful, for whom, and in what circumstances. We review evidence from adaptation science, migration, gender and development studies, and urban sustainability that shows how migration-as-adaptation draws on available resources, social networks, and forms of capital to navigate structural inequalities and shifting risks. Interventions to enable migration as an adaptive response, therefore, need to account for the lived experiences and social reproductions of precarity, adaptive capacity, and well-being.