Climate Change and the Increasing Variability of Rainfall Learning about Water’s Role in Global Migration from

FIGURE 1.1: The Report Takes a Global Perspective to Address Three Questions

Sending region Receiving region

1

WHY MIGRATE? Why and in what context do water shocks in uence migration and development? 2

WHO MIGRATES? Who migrates because of water shocks and what does this mean for productivity and livelihoods? 3

WHERE AND WHAT IMPACTS? What are the impacts of migration, where do they occur, and what are the broader implications for development?

increasingly stressed the links between climate, water scarcity, and migration (Jägerskog and Swain 2016; Wrathall et al. 2018). Estimates by the World Bank suggest that in the absence of concrete action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, more than 140 million migrants could be forced to move by 2050 due to climate change in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America alone (Rigaud et al. 2018).

Tragically, in the Middle East and North Africa, which is the most water-scarce region in the world and is home to 7.2 million refugees and 10.5 million internally displaced people, the interplay between water and migration is being enacted in the shadow of conflict. Ebb and Flow: Volume 2 (Borgomeo et al. 2021), therefore, focuses on the complexities of the water–migration–conflict nexus in the Middle East and North Africa to examine how high levels of water stress interact with the movement of people, and the implications for resource-driven conflict. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought these challenges into even sharper relief through its impacts on the affordability and availability of water (box 1.3).

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE INCREASING VARIABILITY OF RAINFALL

Water scarcity, stress, and climate change are typically portrayed through a lens of averages and trends. But this is seldom an adequate representation of water availability throughout much of the world, where deviations from trends and long-run averages are widespread and are growing more frequent. Adapting to rainfall variability is often much more challenging than accommodating long-term trends because of the unpredictable duration of a deviation, its uncertain magnitude, and its unknown frequency (Adams et al. 2013; World Bank 2021).