Rethinking Climate Change Migration

IAS Guest Speaker Dr Saphia Fleury delivers a seminar on their research -

Recent history can provide lessons around whether and how people will migrate in the context of climate change.

After the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of “boat people” fled communist Vietnam, ostensibly for political reasons. New analysis suggests that environmental factors prompted some peoples’ journeys, overturning our understanding of how environmental change combines with social, political and economic factors to drive refugee flows. 

The eruption in July 1995 of Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills volcano was an unexpected shock for most of the population. However, Montserratian and British authorities had been forewarned and failed to act. As volcanic activity intensified, further policy failures culminated in mass evacuation to the UK.

Delivering new research into these historical migrations, this talk explains how natural hazards are transformed into social crises, which, in these examples, contributed to Asia’s largest refugee flow and depopulated a once prosperous Caribbean island. 

This talk interrogates the reasons that people move – or remain in situ – when faced with environmental change. It argues that migration and relocation are legitimate forms of adaptation to climate change, while proposing efforts to reduce forced displacement. 

Saphia Fleury, Researcher, Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull 

Saphia Fleury holds a PhD from the University of Hull in environmentally driven human migration. Prior to her doctoral studies, Saphia worked for 12 years at the headquarters of Amnesty International, where she published books on international human rights law and specialised in the Middle East and North Africa region and fair trial law. She continues to advise Amnesty as a consultant on human rights and climate change and has co-edited and co-authored Amnesty’s annual State of the World’s Human Rights report since 2008. Saphia is an Expert Reviewer for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has presented evidence to UK Parliamentary Select Committees on issues relating to human rights, migration and climate change. Her current research re-examines documented human rights crises from an environmental point of view, studying how the interaction of environmental change with other factors – social, economic and political – leads to human rights violations.

Arrivals from 11:45 am for a 12:00 noon start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served after the seminar from 1:00pm.

This event is hybrid format, please use the required booking button at the bottom of the page to choose either in-person or online attendance.
(Please note that in-person spaces are limited and booking is required, so we can manage numbers for catering and also the space in the seminar room)

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