“There is a growing recognition that climate change is going to affect security and it’s increasingly shaping peoples’ decisions about where to move, where to live, and how to plan their futures, but how migration, climate, and insecurity connect and drive risks is not always as clear cut as the headlines would have us believe,” said Cynthia Brady, Global Fellow and Senior Advisor with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, at last month’s International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. The roundtable discussion, “Environmental Change, Migration, and Peace in Central America’s Northern Triangle” drew on the Wilson Center’s framework to improve predictive capabilities for security risks posed by a changing climate, developed in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Applying the framework to the Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—panelists discussed complex challenges and proactive approaches for building climate resilience and adaptive capacity. 

Amanda King, Program Associate at the Wilson Center, said one of the central questions the Wilson Center’s framework seeks to answer is “what is needed to construct early warnings and take proactive action on these issues?” The framework includes four “tipping points”—vulnerabilities that climate impacts are likely to interact with in ways that compound risk: physical and natural systems vulnerabilities, transboundary and regional dynamics, political and social instability, and scales of decision-making.  

How the tipping points play out is context specific, and understanding each tipping point helps consolidate the evidence to identify more effective entry points to address the risks.  

The Northern Triangle’s Tipping Points 

Iliana Monterroso, an environmental scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research, said that when we talk about Northern Triangle countries, “we’re talking about multiple crises,” including social and environmental conditions, “that increase populations’ vulnerability to be affected by weather extremes, weather events, and other climate change related risks.” 

In applying the framework to the Northern Triangle, Lauren Herzer Risi, Program Director of the Wilson Center’s ECSP, said, “one of the main goals is to understand how migration dynamics and different levels of violence interact with these climate risks and what that means for our responses.” An aspect of applying the framework here is “to create the shared vision that in fact people have the wherewithal to make choices about their own lives—and how best we support that through information, knowledge, and funding becomes critical,” said Roger Pulwarty, Senior Scientist at NOAA. To use the framework for reaching this goal and finding this shared vision, it’s extremely important to take a systems view.  

“There’s rarely one thing driving a person’s decision to move—there are always multiple push and pull factors,” said Brady. For the Northern Triangle, the all-encompassing reality of governance challenges, pervasive mistrust in government, socio-economic inequities, and an omnipresent level of insecurity are all essential components to understanding migration trends. Monterroso said that peoples’ different experiences with and levels of exposure to these multiple crises have impacts on their adaptation approaches. 

Although extreme and chronic violence is often interconnected with pressures to migrate, securitization of migration trends in the region is an inappropriate policy response, said Brady. We must stay grounded in the reality of how “movement of people in this region has always been a critical adaptive and resilient capacity and is in no small measure a result of the very real and persistent socioeconomic and political inequities in these countries,” she said. Because of these complexities, securitization of migration is an especially ill-suited policy response for the increase of highly vulnerable people migrating, like whole families and unaccompanied minors.  

Relative to the governance challenges, violence, and inequities, environmental pressures have historically played a more minor role in migration trends. However, Central America has been identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as one of the regions most sensitive to climate changes, said Pulwarty.  

As extreme weather and water-related events become more frequent and severe with climate change, environmental pressures are likely to have increasing impacts on livelihoods, security, economies, and all the other complex dynamics which drive migration, said Monterroso. Already, back-to-back hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020, recent droughts, and food insecurity have all been stated as part of migrants’ reasons to move, said Pulwarty. 

Proactive and Prospective Risk Management Entry Points  

Drawing on the lessons learned from the framework, the roundtable discussion highlighted several key solutions for building resiliency and adaptive capacity, including the importance of strengthening land tenure, respecting territorial and Indigenous rights, and trust-building. Opportunities for trust-building are essential for the complexities involved. 

Trust is contextually key because of each nations’ histories of violence, said Monterroso. Because of the insecurity, corruption, and lack of investment in public institutions, citizens mistrust their governments—directly limiting the states’ abilities to respond to the drivers of migration and citizens’ abilities to access resources for addressing the insecurity they experience, said Brady. These factors are why Monterroso’s organization sees land tenure and territorial governance as an entry point for building trust. Operating at this scale allows different groups to develop better processes for working together on more complex issues. 

Trust-building takes time. Developing processes for collaboration and coordination between the different social actors is important but requires considerable effort and is long-term, said Monterroso.  

The time required creates a challenging situation because “actions move at the speed of trust,” said Sherri Goodman, ECSP Senior Fellow. Yet the actions necessary (for adapting to environmental changes, enabling safe and voluntary migration, and peacebuilding) need trust to be built faster, said Risi.  

The time constraints for addressing the socio-economic and trust-related challenges are other reasons why improving predictive capabilities through the Wilson Center-NOAA project’s framework is so timely. Unfamiliar and unprecedented environmental conditions are overwhelming social systems and what we have learned to date, said Pulwarty. The framework enables more proactive identification of entry points for coordinated action, said King, which in turn can facilitate peacebuilding and trust-building processes. 

To build trust well, intervening actors need to be more trustworthy. Pulwarty said that a lot of what we call trust-building or “co-production” of work is more lip-service on giving voice to local actors—or worse, just extracting data to quote them later—while we elevate our latest research and publications.  Pulwarty said that our interventions must be designed through more genuinely collaborative design and implementation processes between peoples who share the same risks.