Working paper: Climate change and human mobility - Impacts and actions across sectors

This working paper addresses climate change and human mobility in Sri Lanka and examines the impacts and actions across sectors. Climate-induced human mobility is multi-causal and has complex, far-reaching impacts on societies and economies. It influences and interacts with national policies, laws, and mechanisms as well as with regional and intergovernmental institutions and processes. While it is predominately conceptualized as cross-border migration, human (im)mobility has many dimensions and can take various forms, including displacement, labour migration, refugees, planned relocation, cyclical rural-urban movements, and trapped populations.

Amoung the key take-aways from the paper are:

• Climate-induced mobility is complex and multi-dimensional;
• The availability and quality of water resources, sanitation, and irrigation can directly influence decisions to migrate;
• Migration, displacement, staying behind, and other forms of climate-related (im)mobility have serious implications for physical and mental health.