pathway that relatively disadvantaged groups may need to follow in order to adapt to climate change and presents it as one of the major negative consequences of climate change (Black et al., 2011). This reflects a more general issue: One person’s climate adaptation can be another person’s climate-induced hazard. Indeed, to take the iteration forward one more step, for aspiring “economic” migrants it is possible that one of the negative consequences of climate change will be stricter limits on mobility. While the climate-led migration crisis narrative relates primarily to international migration, it has important parallels in rural-urban migration. Internationally, borders are used to try to control population movements, and the distinction between the authorized and unauthorized migrant is at least rhetorically central and is used to justify various forms of legal and illegal discrimination (Adepoju et al., 2010; Donato and Armenta, 2011). Intra-nationally, border controls are the exception, and regulations explicitly limiting the rights of rural people to move to urban locations—such as the hukou household registration system in China, once used to place strict limits on migration and still used to limit migrants’ rights—are comparatively rare. Nevertheless, concerns about excessive rural-urban migration are widespread and motivate an array of questionable responses by governments. People intuitively perceive the advantages of urban life, but policymakers see only added burdens to urban management. The latest United Nations data show that 72 per cent of developing countries implement policies aimed at lowering rural-to-urban migration. The proportion is highest (81 per cent) in Africa where current urbanization levels are still low, but it is also high in the Latin America and Caribbean region, which is well on its way to completing its urban transition (United Nations, 2010, Table 16). Such policies reflect a failure to accept the rights of poor migrants to settle in the city and a tendency to conflate poverty with rurality. Although they rarely have a significant and lasting impact on the reduction of migration, these policies do strengthen the antiurbanization stances that inhibit pragmatic and pro-active approaches to inevitable urban growth. They also help to explain why an increasingly large share of urban settlement in most low- and many middle-income countries is informal and deficient in public services. Underpinning these negative views is the assumption that rural migrants are responsible for “uncontrolled” urban growth. However, natural increase—the excess of births over deaths in the urban population—is in most cases a more important factor than rural-urban migration (United Nations, 2008). This is especially true in countries where fertility rates in both rural and urban areas remain high and in nations that have reached high levels of urbanization. Economic growth can also be a factor. China, with its rapid economic growth, is among the countries where rural-urban migration dominates urban growth (China ceased to use the hukou system to curb migration severely once it became clear that urbanization was necessary for economic growth). In contrast, the levels of urbanization were stagnating in some sub-Saharan African countries, probably as a result of declining economic opportunities in urban areas (Potts, 2009). Rural migrants are also often held responsible for increasing urban poverty. Indeed, the estimated urban share of poor people living on less than US$1 a day has increased from 19 per cent in 1993 to 25 per cent in 2002 (Chen and Ravallion, 2007). While income-based measurements underestimate the real extent of urban poverty (Satterthwaite, 2004), there is no evidence to suggest that rural migrants are the majority or even a 26
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