Category: Adaptation

Environmental Migration and the Immigration Debate

UPDATED 7-28

Scientific American has posted a news and commentary piece on a study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that links climate change to increased migration from Mexco to the US.  The author, David Biello, sent me an embargoed copy of the study a few days ago and asked for my comments – which he was kind enough to draw from at length in his article.
In a general way, I am very supportive of work that examines the connection between climate change/environmental change and migration – mostly because so little work has been done on the topic, and the assumptions about the connections between migration and environment that drive policy are so often wildly incorrect.  However, I am a bit leery of this study, as I feel like it is making a classic mistake in environment-migration studies: it is trying to identify the portion of the migration decision that is about environmental change.  As I have argued elsewhere, there is little point in trying to isolate environmental factors from all of the factors that contribute to migration.  Biello quoted me quite accurately:

“Migration decisions, like all livelihood decisions, are about much more than material quality of life,” argues geographer Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina, who studies human migration in countries such as Ghana and was not involved in the Mexico emigration research. “What I am seeing in sub-Saharan Africa are very complex patterns in which environmental change is but one of several causal factors.”

What I am worried about here is a sort of intellectual ambulance-chasing, where the research is driven by a sexy topic (the intersection of climate change and Latino migration, which is sure to bring out the crazies on all sides) regardless of whether or not the fundamental research question is all that sound.  The fact that several researchers quoted in the piece (myself included) were able to quickly poke significant holes in the study suggests that this publication falls into this problematic category.  First, the migration pattern examined and emphasized in this project is likely to be very, very small relative to other kinds of movement.

“Most often international migration is not an option and rural residents migrate to urban areas, contributing to urbanization and urban poverty in developing countries,” says sociologist Elizabeth Fussell of Washington State University.

That is certainly the case in Mexico, according to population and migration researcher Haydea Izazola of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, also not part of Oppenheimer’s team for the new study. “The great majority of the rural population who grow maize—rain-fed agriculture—for their own consumption are the poorest of the poor and lack the means to invest in the very expensive and risky migration venture.”

Further, the very models that predicted the impact of climate change on Mexican agriculture were not applied to the economy of the US, where the migrants are supposed to be headed.

Crop yields in the U.S. will likely suffer as well. “People do not move blindly; they move to greater opportunity,” Carr notes. “So we should probably be using [these economic and climate] models to examine the impact of future climate change on various migrant-employing sectors of the southwestern U.S. economy.”

While the research team that published this study intends to examine this issue, it calls into question even this preliminary study.  I’m honestly surprised this got through peer review . . . except, perhaps that it was too sexy to pass up.
UPDATE: I wrote this late last night, and so was a bit spacey – as a friend of mine reminded me, there is another huge problem with the study – a lot of the “Mexican” migration that people are talking about in the popular media, and indeed in this study, is in fact Latino migration from Central America more broadly.  As these areas were not modeled in this study, we have yet another gaping hole to address.  I repeat: how did this get though peer review?
UPDATE: Well, people are jumping all over this article.  Pielke’s site has a review with a similar take to my own . . .

Posted on by Ed 7

Dead on

Blogger Ansel has written a wonderful post that will probably get attention for the pointed way in which it lays out the formulaic, and therefore ultimately useless, character of the vast majority of reporting on post-earthquake Haiti.  I find it interesting because it screams out for one of my pet projects – the need to connect the global poor to one another and to those in wealthier countries in an unfiltered manner.  Nearly-useless journalism is a huge problem if it is the only source of information emerging from a given place.  The impact of this same problematic journalism, however, can be greatly lessened by the presence of many voices reporting from many angles on the same subject.  At this time, despite the various platitudes about the wonders of mobile phone technology and the internet that are repeated in development circles, the enormous potential of these tools has yet to be realized.  We need to be more honest about this, lest it sound like the technology is there and the only problem is the backward people who won’t use it.
I wonder, though, how comfortable the development industry will be with the gradual, inevitable emergence of many voices through these technologies.  What will we do when the people in whose names we are ostensibly working start telling us no and begin to call out our failures – and do so in a public forum?

Posted on by Ed 2

Availability isn't validity . . .

So, to clarify one one my points from my previous post, let me use an example to show why building an index of development (or an index of anything, really) on data based on its availability can lead to tremendous problems – and result in a situation where the index is actually so misleading as to be worse than having no index at all.
A few years ago, Nate Kettle, Andrew Hoskins and I wrote a piece examining poverty-environment indicators (link here, or check out chapter 9 of Delivering Development when it comes out in January) where we pointed out that the data used by one study to evaluate the relationship between poverty and the environment in Nigeria did not bear much relationship to the meaningful patterns of environment and livelihood in Nigeria.  For example, one indicator of this relationship was ‘percentage of irrigated area in the total agricultural area’, an index whose interpretation rested on the assumption that a greater percentage of irrigated area will maximize the environment’s agricultural potential and lead to greater income and opportunity for those living in the area.  While this seems like a reasonable interpretation, we argued that there were other, equally plausible interpretations:
“While this may be a relatively safe assumption in places where the irrigated area is a very large percentage of total agricultural area, it may not be as applicable in places where the irrigated area is relatively small and where the benefits of irrigation are not likely to reach the entire population. Indeed, in such settings those with access to irrigation might not only experience greater opportunities in an average year, but also have incomes that are much more resistant to environmental shocks that might drive other farmers to adopt severe measures to preserve their livelihoods, such as selling off household stocks or land to those whose incomes are secured by irrigation. In such situations, a small but rising percentage of area under irrigation is as likely to reflect a consolidation of wealth (and therefore declining incomes and opportunities for many) in a particular area as it does greater income and opportunity for the whole population.” (p.90)
The report we were critiquing made no effort to control for these alternative interpretations, at least in part because it had gathered data at the national scale for Nigeria.  The problem here is that Nigeria contains seven broad agroecological zones (and really many more subzones) in which different crops and combinations of crops will be favored – averaging this across the country just homogenizes important differences in particular places into a general, but meaningless indicator.  When we combined this environmental variability with broad patterns of land tenure (people’s access to land), we found that the country really had to be divided up into at least 13 different zones – in each zone, the interpretation of this poverty-environment indicator was likely to be consistent, but there was no guarantee that it would be consistent from zone to zone.  In some zones, a rising area under irrigation would reflect a positive shift in poverty and environmental quality, while in others it might reflect declining human well-being.
To add to this complexity, we then mapped these zones against the smallest administrative units (states) of Nigeria at which meaningful data on poverty and the environment are most likely to be available.  What resulted was this:

A map contrasting the 13 agroecological zones in which poverty-environment indicators might be consistently interpreted and the boundaries of the smallest administrative units (states) in Nigeria that might have meaningful poverty and environmental data

As you can see, there are several states with multiple zones inside their borders – which means a single indicator cannot be assumed to have the same interpretion across the state (let alone the entire country).  So, while there might be data on poverty and environmental quality available at the state level such that we can identify indicators and build indexes with it, the likelihood is that the interpretation of that data will be, in many cases, incorrect, leading to problematic policies (like promoting irrigation in areas where it leads to land consolidation and the marginalization of the poor) – in other words, making things much worse than if there was no index or indicator at all.
Just because the data is available doesn’t mean that it is useful, or that it should be used.

Posted on by Ed 0

Equality in the oddest places – or why purchasing power parity matters

My family and I are in the midst of a relocation to Washington, DC, a city with a cost of living at least 35% higher than my current home here in Columbia, SC. The rent for our (nice but hardly lavish) new place approaches double that of my current mortgage, and childcare is going to run us 50% above what we are used to here. And I am moving to take up a fellowship that grants me a 13% increase over my current salary to make up these costs . . . yes, I am going backward to take up this position, but I think this opportunity is too important to pass up. Luckily, my wife agrees.
The net outcome of this is a situation where my family will be living hand-to-mouth for a year or two, despite having two pretty good salaries under one roof. This situation reminds me of a story I use to explain the importance of purchasing power parity when comparing incomes and/or material standards of living in different places. Purchasing power parity is a measure of what your money will buy you, based on a “market basket” of goods that you might buy in each place. Since things like food are much more expensive here in the United States than they are in farming communities in sub-Saharan Africa, it makes no sense to compare incomes between these two places without normalizing for what those incomes can purchase. Which leads to my story . . .
My first year doing fieldwork in Ghana, I spent a lot of time simply hanging around, talking to people, getting my bearings and building relationships. Once the folks in Dominase and Ponkrum realized that I was 1) actually listening to them when they spoke and 2) willing to answer any questions they might have of me, I never lacked for evening conversation. This was especially true when I was buying the akpeteshi (distilled palm wine – it’s pretty serious stuff).

Fun at the akpeteshi still, 1998

One night, while I was talking about money, incomes and making a living with a group of people in Dominase, the issue of my income and net worth came up. Now, at the time I was a graduate student in Anthropology, just about to start a Ph.D. program in Geography. I was fortunate enough to have a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which is (by grad school standards) a very generous award . . . but it was still not much to live on. In the interest of honesty, I told them exactly what my annual stipend amounted to: $14,000*. Once someone managed to convert that into Cedis (the local currency, then trading at about 2300 to the dollar), this news resulted in shouting and amazement.
I then asked if I could explain what things cost me in America. I began to lay things out – my rent of $350/month (this provoked a near-riot, as $350 is as much as some households earn in a year in these villages). Then the cost of food – and another near riot, as the farmers began to realize that crops like the oranges they sold me for the equivalent of 5 cents were worth at least twenty times that amount in the US. I then explained about my car, gasoline, insurance, clothing, etc. Never let anyone suggest that a lack of education leads to deficiencies in mathematics – despite incomplete elementary educations, nearly every person in these villages engages in trade in markets in nearby towns. As a result, they can add and subtract large and complex sums in their heads very, very rapidly. Several of the villagers talking to me were converting the amounts I was listing into Cedis, and then adding this total up as we went along. As I came to the end, one of them looked at me and said (in Fante, via my field assistant’s interpretation) “then you have nothing!” “Yes!” I replied (in English – I did not yet speak Fante – but yes is pretty well understood in Anglophone Africa). There was a pause, and then a general cheer of “nothing!” broke out among the assembled group – and with that, most residents of the village stopped seeing me as particularly rich, and therefore much more able to understand what it meant to live from hand to mouth as they did**. At the end of each month, we all had nothing!
Here I am, some 13 years later – with tenure, and paid reasonably well. And moving into a situation where, once again, at the end of each month I will have nothing! I’m not sure if the folks in Dominase and Ponkrum will be horrified or amused. But they will understand . . .
* I should note that I was completely screwed by NSF with regard to the size of my stipend – there was no cost of living adjustment across the four years I held the fellowship. As soon as it ran out for me, though, they instituted a 50% (!!!) increase – the next year. Yes, I am still a little bitter about that.
** This is not to say that I did, in the end, completely understand what it meant to be a resident of these villages. While I tried as hard as I could to live under the same strictures as the villagers when I was in the villages, I also spent time in more comfortable settings in Cape Coast. Further, when things went wrong (such as in 1998, when the monsoon failed and a lot of the farms around these villages failed), I experienced short-term discomfort and frustration, but always knew that I had resources to meet my needs, if only I chose to walk a few miles to the nearest road and catch a cab. Thus, while I spent a few days without food in 1998, like everyone else in these villages, I always knew that if things got really bad, I could get to a road and to a store where I could buy food with money from my bank account in the US. Thus, I cannot say that I understand what it is like to live on the edge like the people I work with do each and every day – honestly, none of us really can.

Posted on by Ed 1

Finally, a hopeful note on malaria?

Ah, malaria – I’m all too acquainted with this particular issue, having had it several times in the course of my fieldwork.  The first time is pretty miserable . . . but by about the fourth case, it is just a day feeling like you have the flu.  Of course, this presumes that you are relatively young and healthy – if not, malaria can be quite dangerous.
I am one of the “lucky” few who could not go near Mefloquine (brand name Larium to those of you who have taken anti-malarials) back when it was the “best choice” for preventing malaria.  I didn’t get malaria . . . but it did drive me toward a temporary bipolar situation and left me with residual vertigo that even now, 13 years later, I still feel at times.  So, after that experience, I simply stopped taking antimalarials entirely, and tried to deal with bugsprays and long pants as much as possible.  The relatively recent arrival of Malarone has made it possible for me to take effective antimalarials again, and when I am on short trips I do.  For the long term, though, you really shouldn’t be taking anti-malarials . . . they are really not good for you, and at some point they do become more problematic than malaria itself.
Given this situation, I have taken a rather acute interest in the efforts to battle malaria.  I’ve watched vaccines come and go.  I’ve seen the rage for bed nets as panacea consume everyone, even though they are quite compromised in their effectiveness by the fact that the anopheles mosquito likes to fly in the evening, when people are not yet in bed, and tends to fly very low to the ground, and thus below the level of many beds.  Hell, some crazy people have come up with a laser that can shoot mosquitos out of the air, thus preventing bites – the coolest, and most totally impractical solution for malaria I’ve ever seen (click here for a movie – really).  How, precisely, are people meant to power and maintain a LASER WHEN THEY HAVE NO ELECTRICITY?  And as I have watched all of these efforts, I have wished and hoped that someone could figure out a way to deal with this damn disease for the purely selfish reason that I am tired of getting it.
So, I was pretty excited to hear about a new development in this fight – an effort to genetically engineer mosquitos so that they cannot carry the parasite in the first place (LA Times, BBC, Tonic).  Malaria is obscenely difficult to kill, because it goes through a large number of stages in its life cycle, and each stage is vulnerable to treatment in different ways – thus, a treatment that works early in the infection cycle may not work on later stage infections – and worse, if there are parasites going through different stages at the same time (some have been gestating for longer than others), a treatment might only work on a fraction of the parasites in the bloodstream and liver at any given time.  But malaria has one weakness – it must have people to live in.  Without us, eventually there would be no malaria – we are the host, and mosquitos must collect it from our blood, before passing it to other people.  So, if the mosquito cannot act as the carrier, the parasite cannot move between hosts – and eventually the parasite dies out (the only real way to contract malaria is through mosquito bite*).  In other words, this just might work . . .
But there are serious caveats here.  First, we have to genetically modify mosquitos to do this.  Then we have to get the genetically modified versions to mate with unmodified versions, and for the genes that restrict malaria to be the ones that emerge in the offspring.  Since these genes would not convey any adaptive advantage to the mosquitos (the genetic modification actually causes them to die young, which strikes me as a significant genetic disadvantage), there is really no guarantee that this would happen – it could be that the modified mosquitos’ impact on the overall genetic pool is tiny – or huge.  I shudder a little at the proposed solution for this (From LA Times):

“connecting the gene to a piece of DNA that helps it spread by, for example, producing something that kills any mosquitoes that don’t contain the desired gene. Other research groups are working to develop such clever genetic tricks, but they are still years away from implementation.”

Once we start playing with a wider set of genes, I get worried.  As the article goes on to note, the effects of such modification are hard to predict in a single species, and since that species participates in a wider ecosystem, the impact on other species is equally hard to predict.  The last thing anyone wants are supermosquitos (a la superweeds and other superbugs that have resulted from previous genetic modification efforts).  So this is not a magic bullet, just a hopeful volley in what has been, and promises to be, a long battle.
*Funny side story: in 1999, I arrived back in Syracuse, NY just as a pretty bad case of malaria flared up.  Despite my protestations, several of my grad student colleagues bundled me off to the emergency room.  When the admissions person asked me what was wrong, I told her – rather simply – “I have malaria”.  The women stared at me for a second, and then said “should I be wearing a mask or something?”  I was pretty beaten up at that point, with an accordingly short temper, which explains my response: “Honey, unless you have a jar of anopheles mosquitos back there, I think we’re going to be alright.”

Posted on by Ed 4