How worried should we be about climate refugees? (Episode 2)

Note: This transcript is auto generated and lightly edited.

MICHAEL: What we should be paying attention to is people who can't move, people who are not able to access the highly effective climate adaptation strategy of moving and facilitating to the degree possible within our creaking cobbled immigration regulatory system, their movement and their ability to access that frequently mutually beneficial pathway for adaptation, but also other forms of adaptation. 

MONICA: Welcome to Policy for the Planet, a new bimonthly podcast exploring the global response to the climate crisis.  

I'm Monica de Bolle, a best-selling author and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, based in Washington, D.C. My work bridges the fields of economics, science, public policy, and public health–all under an international lens. 

In each episode, I speak in-depth with experts to understand how governments are responding to the monumental challenges of the climate emergency. We'll unravel the complex tradeoffs of different policy choices to steer us toward sustainable practices and public well-being. 

Welcome to the conversation!

The rise in extreme weather events is forcing more and more people to leave their homes. Reports of millions of "climate refugees" uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures, and other catastrophes are stirring concern across the political spectrum. But the headlines don't tell the full story and could be distracting us from the even bigger problem.

Today we'll consider the broader implications of global climate migration.

Joining me is Michael A. Clemens, a leading voice on the intersection of climate and human movement. Michael is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Hello, Michael, and welcome to the show. Thank you for sharing your expertise on this fascinating topic with us. I think I'm just going to jump right in and ask you, can you tell us a little bit more about your work and what led you to this particular field, the study of migration, immigration, and so on?

MICHAEL: Yes, thank you so much for letting me be here. I am an economist. I'm a professor of economics. And for the last 15, 17 years, I've studied mostly international migration that causes and effects from an economic perspective of international migration and why do I do that? I mean Migration is everywhere humanity migrated out of Africa. Most Americans in my own country the United States the large majority of Americans have at least one immigrant in themselves or their parents or their grandparents that is somebody in their family that they have known. It's a very immediate personal experience.

And not just that, international migration is the most effective way that people have to change their circumstances. It's for low income people. It's the most effective, clear way to act to increase economic opportunity, to protect yourself from violence and to ensure yourself against environmental change.

MONICA: And fun fact, but this is really a parenthesis to our conversation. We have just found out that we have common roots in the same country. So I'm, as you know, from Brazil and specifically from Rio, and you had family from Rio. Part of your family is from there.

MICHAEL: My grandmother came to America in the 1930s from Brazil, so I am one of those majority of Americans who has a foreign-born person among my grandparents or later.

MONICA: So that I thought was a lot of fun because it's not every day that you're sitting next to someone who's from your, well, not who has family from your hometown, which is…

MICHAEL: Every morning at breakfast we have pão de queijo.

MONICA: This is a Brazilian delicacy. I will tell our listeners right now. You cannot go through life and never have a cheese bread or a pão de queijo. So keep that in mind for the future.

So anyway, just this week, I was reading a piece about Africa in a major US newspaper and I came across this line." Africa's debt and growth problems are likely to worsen as climate change makes some lands uninhabitable, forcing people to leave their homes and migrate." Sounds very logical, sounds very intuitive, but how true is it? Is climate change really pushing more people to migrate?

MICHAEL: Yes and no. So it's complicated. Economists are just some of the scientists who have studied this issue. But there are clear findings from economics in this regard. First of all, let's talk about one aspect of climate change, which is temperatures, and one aspect of migration, which is international migration. And you can approach it from lots of other perspectives.

Economists have found that rising temperatures to date, not even a projection into the future, have reduced economic growth. That's the finding of Melissa Dell and her co-authors. She's one of the most respected economists at Harvard. She won the Clark Medal for being one of the best living up and coming economists. And at the same time, and that's the yes part and the no part is that economists have also directly tested whether the same rising temperatures over recent decades have led to more emigration from developing countries, from lower income countries. That's Giovanni Peri, who is unsurpassed as an immigration economist in the world. And he finds something extremely striking, which is that considering countries that have had relatively greater increases in average temperature over last 30 years, among middle income countries, thinking of Malaysia, Colombia, there is no relationship between rising temperatures and international immigration, people leaving that country. Among low income countries, thinking of Malawi and Nepal, there is a strong relationship and it's negative. Countries that have a greater increases in temperatures have less immigration.

MONICA: So why is that? And why do we, at a first glance, when we hear that, that are relatively poor with rising temperatures, there's actually an inverse relationship or a negative relationship between migration and rising temperatures. As you put it well, rising temperatures are actually not leading people to migrate. There's less of that happening. What explains that? Because I think for most people that will sound off.

MICHAEL: So to talk about that, we have to go deep. And I know you want to go deep. Monica always never stays on the surface. So the clearest way I can think of to understand it is to think of international migration for some of the poorest people in the world, not as a free choice of where to live, but as a costly investment. It's something that is very difficult. It could be emotionally painful. It can be financially costly, whether you do it through paying visa fees and buying plane travel or whether you pay smugglers. It's a very costly, risky thing to do with often large benefits in the future, a lot like, let's say, getting an advanced degree.

And if we think about, if we think about lower income people, a group of lower income people, and then some of them get a negative income shock, would they be more or less likely to invest a lot in education and go to college and get advanced degrees? You might think, well, obviously people who are richer end up investing a lot more in education. People who are poorer or who got a negative income shock invest a lot less in education because they are what economists would call capital constraint. They don't have all the money in the world to make a free choice and say, well, now that I'm poorer, I need a college degree much more, so I'll be more likely to get a college degree. It doesn't work like that. And if we think for a minute about migration as an investment, it works the same way. And this is not just stepping back from climate issues.

One of the strongest patterns in development and emigration is that poorer countries have relatively less immigration, richer countries have relatively more, and as poorer countries get richer, they have relatively more immigration. It's for so many reasons, not just that people have more disposable income to pay those costs directly, but for much less tangible reasons, like economic development raises the gap between aspirations and achievements for people within a local economy. And also is accompanied by demographic changes that tend to create more migration pressure. The bottom line is richer countries have more immigration.

MONICA: This is really interesting and I think a fascinating point too.

There's a climate shock that is going to make a portion of the world that is already poor, even poorer, then those people are going to be locked in and not going to be able to move or to migrate when perhaps that is desirable, right? Given that perhaps in their home countries, they will lack the opportunities even to subsist. If we think of things like subsistence farming which tends to be predominant in many of these low income countries. And therefore you will see this gap that already exists between incomes in different places. You'll see these inequalities and these gaps become ever bigger. Is that a correct interpretation of what we've said?

MICHAEL: You said it much better than I. I mean, when you could summarize it as is that, yes, climate change has already impacted economic growth. The range of studies that have been done in and out of economics suggest that the impact has been and will be greater on poorer countries. And that's not just going to raise the need for migration as an adaptation strategy, but it will limit the means to invest in that adaptation strategy with the result of there not being many international climate migrants.

And I have to say there's just a whole lot of overheated rhetoric out there. You see headlines in slate.com's, quote, what are we going to do with 200 million climate refugees? Because the World Bank published this study and, you know, the study actually counts 216 million additional displaced people from slow and rapid onset climate events by 2050, all of which in that study are internal migrants. And the more careful studies that count international migrants, one I'm thinking of from the International Monetary Fund by Christina Cattaneo and her co -authors, suggest something much more limited, like one to three million additional international migrants per year between now and 2050, 2060, just a much, much lesser phenomenon. And a big part of that is this tension between need and means.

MONICA: Which does not actually, I mean, what you've just described does not make the situation better. It's the opposite. Right. Which is something that I think we should also bring out because the the expectation that all 200 million or whatever the number is of international migrants that are moving because of climate change issues. It's not that number, it's a much smaller number because we have just picked apart how precisely people make that decision to migrate and how if they're poor, they're not going to have the ability to migrate. So that number is a lot smaller. So that's not really the problem. The problem is you're locking in people that should be moving. You're locking them in certain areas where they can't leave. And therefore the issue should be facilitating their movement.

MICHAEL: The very effects of climate change will serve to lock them in because it's an expensive investment. And really what you just said is the finding of the UK government, the European Commission have done comprehensive literature reviews on the subject and that's what they conclude is that we should be most worried about people who can't move, not about vast waves of people moving.

I'm an economist, not a political scientist or a psychologist, so I don't study these things, but I do note the...how useful headlines about huge waves of climate migrants are across the political spectrum. People who are suspicious of immigration on the right can use it to scare people, people who might be on the political left and wanting to find ways to snap people out of, how to find ways to get people to pay more attention to greenhouse gas mitigation and to climate change might also have a use for extremely scary headlines about large waves of people, but the research just doesn't bear that out.

MONICA: So on the issue of who actually migrates and where they go, who they are, and so on, what can we say? I mean, where are the people migrating to and from for the largest part? I mean, you've already said a bit about this, but can we? Can we dig deeper? Can we say something more?

MICHAEL: You mean due to climate forces?

MONICA: Due to climate forces.

MICHAEL: All of the serious research suggests that the large majority are moving within countries. They're moving away from coastal areas, from areas where there is salinization of freshwater, where there are repeated protracted droughts, and they're moving away from...vulnerable coastal areas, they're moving often from rural areas to urban areas. The whole developing world has been urbanizing for many decades and climate change is accelerating that. But again, the serious research suggests that really that is the dominant form of movement and not across international borders.

MONICA: This is another critical point because of course the politically...People will use the idea of mass migration from climate change and a lot of climate refugees just flooding the borders across the developed world, but that's not really what the research is saying. And what the research is actually showing is that the levels of international migration, that's not where the action is actually happening.

With climate change, the action is actually happening within internal migration, where people just move around within their own home country, which again speaks back and harks back to this idea that, or the notion that people make migration decisions based on their ability measured by financial means or whatever else we want to use, their ability to actually move. And if their ability is diminished, they will move in-house rather than moving abroad. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yes. And I do want to temper that there is there is certainly evidence that that climate forces, especially rapid onset events such as major floods, hurricanes, which are going to become more prevalent under climate change, do cause spikes of international migration. Yeah.

I'm thinking, for example, of the work of Ana Maria Ibanez, who is a top scholar of migration and development at the Inter-American Development Bank and her co-authors, they measured the relationship between extremes of temperature in rural areas of El Salvador and the tendency for agrarian households to move irregularly to the United States. And they do find a strong relationship there. So even part of the situation at the border could be, could arise from the inability to adapt to rapid-onset events that are going to become more complex.

I don't mean to say that that climate forces, especially short onset, are not a major driver, particularly in the short term. When I mentioned the work of Giovanni Perri earlier about temperature changes over decades and changes in migration over decades, here we're talking about slow onset events or maybe the accumulation of many rapid onset events that tend to impoverish economies and make it difficult for people to adapt in place. That has been undermining the ability of people to adapt through movements precisely because it impoverishes. So it's complex and I don't mean to suggest that nothing related to climate change can cause migration. There's clear evidence that it can.

MONICA: Now, those are very important points. And I think the nuance that needs to be present so that people don't hear these things that oftentimes will come from very ideological or political speech with respect to migration. But you mentioned the border. And of course, the border is a major issue, as we all know.

In what you were saying, you were you're basically making the point that, of course, climate change does have an impact on some migration and what we see happening at the border is somewhat in part impacted by that or somewhat in part generated by that, but not to the extent that people think, right?

MICHAEL: Absolutely. It's really rapid onset climate events like Hurricane Mitch hitting Honduras clearly caused a wave of migration to the US and some of the Hondurans now are having their movement facilitated by who came to the US in response to Hurricane Mitch. So there is certainly migration, especially spikes of migration that are caused by people's inability to insure themselves against the ravages of especially short onset climate events in place. It's just that there's an intuition that grips people when they think about poverty and migration.

I sat opposite a leading expert on poverty and development in Europe once, to whom I explained this research and she said, you have to understand I talked to these people and they tell me I left because of poverty and joblessness. And you're telling me that more poverty and joblessness isn't going to make more people move, like are they lying to me? And it's not at all that they're lying or that she's wrong. She's right. It's just that the people who can't move due to poverty and joblessness, you're not talking to because they're not migrants. And those can both be true at the same time. so I'm thinking of the research of Fernando Martinez and her co -authors. They this remarkable thing, wanting to measure the relationship between climate shocks in West Africa and migration to Europe. So they gathered data on 110,000 people at the International Organization for Migrations. 20 flow monitoring stations in the northern area of West Africa who at places where many migrants passed randomly sample people, ask them for an interview and ask them stuff like, where do you come from? Where are you going? What for? And then they compared the places of origin of those people with remote sensing data on soil moisture. the goal is, well, when there is a negative shock to soil moisture, things are not going well for agrarian incomes. Does that drive people north and for most households, except for the richest talking about the poorest people or even middle income people in parts of West Africa, a relatively dry season meant people were less likely to leave. It was only for people who had a lot of capital already relatively for whom a negative shock meant what might seem intuitive to too many people listening now, which is that a negative shock would raise the need to leave. So more people leave.

For most people, it undermined the means to leave. People have to pay thousands of dollars, borrow money from all of their friends and family, save up for years to pay the costs involved. And when there's a bad season, you're much less likely to be able to do that. You're much less willing to go into terrible debt and people move less. And that is the kind of complexity that leads to an ambiguous relationship between even shocks of that kind and the kind of migration that is of such concern to people in the Mediterranean and at the US border, notwithstanding the clear intuition of talking to people. There's nothing in conflict there. These things can both be true.

MONICA: And so from a human perspective, it's a very tragic story that we're bringing up. It contradicts the underlying intuitions that people have. And at the same time, it brings out this sense of millions and millions of people in the global South and in other parts of the developing world that are just going to be locked in.

MICHAEL: And that does not benefit richer countries.

MONICA: That is a point.

MICHAEL: There are chickens that will come home to roost there. Poverty overseas breeds violence. It breeds disease. It eliminates potential markets for exports. It affects the rest of the world. And it affects the core of the world economy in countless ways. It's just that this particular way, which for various reasons is trumpeted across the political spectrum of lots of migrants showing up at quote unquote our doorstep is really, is not found by most research.

MONICA: So in essence what we're saying is a world with climate change unless we take actions that actually facilitate the movement of all people when the circumstances arise. So when you have a very severe drought in a particular region and that people who subsist off the land can't subsist off the land. So in principle, they need to move. If they cannot move, then you have a world of increasing inequality, increasing issues for the global economy as a whole, because of course, less development and more poverty in the developing world has global consequences of the kind that you speak of. But then in addition to all of that, you just have a world that is just broadly more unequal, which is definitely not a good thing and not something that we should want. So we need to understand the situation in the right way.

MICHAEL: Yes, I mean, there are many proposals for adaptation to climate change, many proposals for mitigating climate change. Arvind Subramanian here at the Peterson Institute has argued for focusing on technological advances, adaptation through technological advances as the most feasible and effective among the various courses that we have. But certainly moving from coastal areas away from coastal areas, moving from rural areas to cities and moving from heavily affected countries to other countries is going to be one of the most effective adaptation strategies available. And unfortunately, the institutions that we have to regulate international migration are not at all adequate to that reality.

MONICA: Yeah, neither are the countries that would potentially be recipient countries. Are they politically, are they politically prepared to face or to fight for cooperation on issues that facilitate movement and therefore adaptation of people across the world?

MICHAEL: Not at all. mean, thinking of the United States and there are many other countries in the same position.

Our fundamental legal framework for regulating migration was written in 1965. It's been reformed since then, but that remains the fundamental law of the land, meaning that my great-grandparents' generation wrote the laws that are now facing climate change. And there isn't a legal provision that is clearly adaptable to climate change in there.

In the United States and most other countries, there are three forms of legal migration. There's family sponsorship, which is definitely not going to do it. There's employment-based sponsorship both of those mean somebody in the country of destination has to Be specifically sponsoring and requesting you to come whether or not you're interested in coming from Malawi is irrelevant and then there's humanitarian migration and that's it humanitarian is the only channel that takes into account where the focus is the is the need or desire of people to move rather than the sponsorship of an employer or the sponsorship of a family member. And climate change has, and the effects of climate change have never fit and aren't going to fit within the Geneva Convention definition of a refugee, which was defined in the ravages of World War II around persecution based on well-defined social groups.

When I first began to work on climate-induced migration and disaster-induced migration, I convened a roundtable of refugee experts thinking they would really want to engage and say, can we expand the definition of refugee to accommodate these new forces? And it was one of the many times in my career I've been wrong. They were almost universally heavily opposed to it. This was long before the really dismantling of the US refugee admission system under the previous US administration many years before that. And they already saw that the political constituency for refugees in the US was fragile. And there was a very important, it was very important to ring fence it and not try to expand it and place heavy new burdens on that system because they thought it could crack and the 86% decline in refugee admissions under the previous administration suggests that they were right and I was very naive about that.

But then that doesn't leave a lot of options in the creaking old regulatory system we have. If family migration is not going to do it and the humanitarian system is not going to do it, then is it going to be a new climate visa? Is that really something the world is going to get on board with and how would you identify?

How would an individual prove that they're a climate migrant? Anyway, what Sam Huckstep of the Center for Global Development and I came down to is that if there's going to be a regulatory regime, it's going to have to be a combination of regional free movement protocols, free movement within West Africa, free movement within Southeast Asia, which is in its infancy still, de jure and de facto, but is possible.

And there is some degree of regional consensus around those things that is emerging over decades. And labor -based pathways, which are mostly defined around employer sponsorship. And in the US, for example, there's no way for President Biden to say, I think Honduras should get 100,000 more work visas this year.

MONICA: Imagine that.

MICHAEL: Can't be done. It's employer sponsorship. So it requires employers to want specifically Hondurans and the president doesn't hand out employment -based visas like that. So we have a, as the great scholar of migration, Lant Pritchett puts it, we have an unstoppable force meeting in a movable object, and that's going to result in some chaos, but vastly less chaos than I think alarmists have portrayed.

MONICA: So Michael, we talked a lot about how the U.S. and the political discourse in the U.S. views migration and how that in the end ends up spilling over into policy and certain policy actions with respect to migration. How about other regions? How about, for example, what happens in Europe with respect to migration. How do you see that and how do you compare that, if at all, with what we see happening in the US?

MICHAEL: I think there's a lot of commonality, very different circumstances, but it's not a coincidence that the Brexit movement was built fundamentally around skepticism of relatively high levels of migration recently and that that happened in concert with related events across the ocean. In Europe recently we've seen major electoral gains for political parties skeptical of immigration in Germany, the Netherlands, in a recent election in Portugal. There were major gains made by a political party whose name you know as Brazilian is literally Chega. Enough! And they're referring specifically to, principally to migration.

There's no doubt at all that people are experiencing a lot of disappointment and stress about the effects of and the potential effects of migration under the current regulatory regime. That to me makes it even more urgent that we focus on policy innovation and certainly not just in the US. In Australia, this is necessary.

In Korea, undergoing major demographic change now and in the next few years needs major policy innovation. Western Europe, particularly countries following closely after Korea in demographic change, thinking of Spain, thinking of Italy, a little after them, Germany, are going to need a whole lot of innovation, certainly including migration policy in order to retain economic dynamism and address some of the objectively reasonable concerns that people have. The thing I want to hammer home is that the effect of migration is what countries make of it. Migration fundamentally is what you make it. There's no such thing as the effect of a migrant. The legal circumstances in which a person comes, the skills with which they arrive, the amount of investment in their language skills and social and economic integration on arrival our major determinants of the effects of immigration. So the effects of immigration in Europe, in the United States, in Asia are principally up to us.

MONICA: Okay, so in the US and in other countries, it's kind of similar to the US. The immigration system cannot comport or cannot deal with the kind of migration that we might get due to climate change. There would be in principle ways to change that. For instance, the one you were talking about, expanding the definition of refugees so that we can, so that the humanitarian route could be the way by which people then move.

But that's closed off due to political reasons in the US. And it's the same in other parts of the world, where people think that migration is not going to help anyone, which is a wrong way of thinking about migration to begin with. And then it opens up this whole can of worms of, if you can't migrate for humanitarian reasons, and climate change is a humanitarian reason, but if you can, then. What is it that you do?

MICHAEL: We're not doomed. There are ways around it. My mentor and undergraduate was a great anthropologist of development named Ted Scudder. He used to say, Michael, I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think there is a way. I just don't think we're going to find it. And there's clearly a way.

There's no such thing as the effect of migration. There's the effect of migration in certain institutional contexts. The fiscal effect of migration, the labor market, the social effects of migration have a lot to do on whether it's illegalized or not.

Mostly, policy and the framework, the policy framework just determines the effects of migration.

Well, let me just pause for a second. No, guess giving you stuff to…

MONICA: Now I was gonna piggyback what you were saying to ask you what you think policymakers should do.

MICHAEL: Yes So what I wanted to say was this. We need a ton more innovation. You know, the US hasn't had a serious reform of its immigration laws in 34 years. 1990 was a long time ago.

MONICA: And a different world.

MICHAEL: A completely different world. And climate change is really a part of the mental landscape now in a way that it wasn't at all in 1990. No specialists knew what was going to happen. And we don't have a legal framework that is up to the task. We need certainly a lot more innovation. We need a way for countries to be treated differently.

Why is it that the 1965 law of governing that continues to govern immigration in the United States is such a has such a stranglehold on immigration policy? The 1965 immigration reform dismantled a fundamentally racist system of immigration regulation in the United States up to that point. It was the end of 83 years, for example, of Chinese exclusion in the United States.

Migration is usually a regional phenomenon in the world and the effects of climate change cause mostly local migration within countries and to the extent that it goes international migration, it is primarily regional. And we, for that very good historical reason, the fact that we're still laboring under the same legal framework whose job was to undo generations of racist preferences for certain countries has had the side effect of making it very difficult to even have regional migration policies now. It's right, but there is no way for the White House to just give more visas to one region, particularly affected by climate change. So you see a lot of ad hoc solutions.

When people say, the humanitarian system is the right way to handle this. I point them to the last three biggest migration crises in the world, which you could list as Venezuelans and Colombians, Peru and elsewhere, Syrians in Turkey and elsewhere, and Ukrainians in Western Europe. And in which of those cases are most of the migrants being adjudicated as refugees? Zero.

MONICA: Yeah, none of them.

MICHAEL: In all three cases, they are being regulated under an an ad hoc temporary protected status of one kind or another, after which comes who knows what, and is not within the refugee system, a small minority of each of those flows is refugees, the rest is being sort of made up at the time. I even know some of the people who were in the room when they were trying to figure out what to do with Venezuelans arriving en masse in Colombia, and they were really making it up, I think brilliantly, in real time.

There needs to be a lot more systematic innovation. There needs to be a lot more communication about policy design and what works and what doesn't between countries in this new world. And not the very idea that we can be proceeding for mutual benefit with a framework designed in 1965 is something that a new generation needs to dismantle and rebuild.

MONICA: Especially a legislation that, well, in a different context, in a different time for a different, with different objectives and in a different world. All of it, I mean, it's, think the case for change and modernization and upgrading of things that we do in the US and in other parts of the world is well overdue.

MICHAEL: Well, when people view what's happening at the US border through the lens of law enforcement and say, well, here's a bunch of people breaking the law, I think to myself, law absolutely needs to be enforced and the rule of law is a crucial institution. But if that's all you have to say about the issue, just think back to the people who designed the central framework for regulating migration in the US in 1965. It was 1965.

Does anybody really think that they foresaw demographic change in Mexico and the huge movement of Mexicans to the United States in the 80s and 90s that they knew all about the Latin American financial crisis and the peso crisis that they understood 9 /11 and they foresaw the collapse of Venezuela and they knew all about climate change. Of course not. So if all you have to say is, we should enforce their will because they knew exactly what's good for us, we really need to go deeper than that and we need to be thinking about what's best for humanity right now. Which is going to require a new legal framework and more innovation.

MONICA: Perfect. So we're coming up to the end of the episode, but what would you say, I don't want to leave this out, what would you say we need to be paying attention to in order to have a sense of whether or not things are moving in the right direction?

MICHAEL: What should we be paying attention to?

To simplify greatly, we should not be paying attention to some of the overheated rhetoric from the right, about hundreds of millions of climate refugees. There just isn't evidence that that magnitude of people is going to move internationally due to climate change, rapid onset events, or slow onset events. We should also not be paying attention to some of the overheated rhetoric from some people on the political left who understandably want to call attention to and spur action towards mitigating climate change.

Also claiming that this is going to be a giant problem coming to your doorstep soon. What we should be paying attention to is people who can't move, people who are not able to access the highly effective climate adaptation strategy of moving and facilitating to the degree possible within our creaking cobbled immigration regulatory system, their movement and their ability to access that frequently mutually beneficial pathway for adaptation, but also other forms of adaptation. I don't know where you fall on this, but I find Arvind Subramanian's case very convincing that new technologies, especially energy technologies, are a key source of fruitful adaptation strategy.

MONICA: No, I absolutely agree. And I think if there's one key message that kind of comes out of our conversation, that message should be facilitating migration is climate adaptation.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Brilliant.

MONICA: So Michael, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I certainly did, because this is, as it is for you, a topic that's near and dear to my heart. And I hope that we have, you know, been able to undo or throw out some of the myths that circulate and populate people's imaginations about climate change and migration. So thank you so much for joining us.

Michael: It's my pleasure and honor. Thank you.

MONICA: Thank you for joining me on Policy for the Planet. Have a question or a topic to suggest? Email me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. 

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