Forced migration and environmental problems: challenges and perspectives

The COVID-19 crisis has led to unprecedented disruption to the healthcare system and to economies and society, revealing the systemic fragility of our world. More recently, the war in Ukraine has seen a return to emergency conditions, causing a massive humanitarian crisis while threatening the world's recovery. The effects of these geopolitical tensions have spread worldwide, and countries all over the globe are facing further disruption due to rising food and energy prices, inflationary pressures, disrupted supply chains, financial turbulence and so forth, while there are serious concerns that the plans to address climate change will be slowed or even abandoned in some parts of the planet. In this context, it is evident that conflicts and crises are increasing worldwide and more people than ever are being displaced, with a serious risk to their lives and future, and with a growing number of women and children being affected. Against this background and such serious issues, we address the following questions: Are the current migration policies, especially those concerning forced migration, adequate to meet current challenges and opportunities? What guidelines will policy makers follow at European and global level if a clear framework for future policies for conflict- and environment-induced forced migration has not been properly laid down? Our contribution will thus investigate the link between external events such as conflict and climate change, and human mobility, while assessing how such movements could reinforce existing inequalities or create new imbalances, focusing especially on the gender gap. Moreover, while there is substantial agreement among scientists and scholars that climate is changing rapidly, the connections between climate change and human mobility are not always very well explained or understood. Forced migration is generally presented using sensationalistic and alarming predictions, promoting fear-based stories of waves of climate-induced migrants forced to relocate from their place of residence, eventually disembarking in Europe and North America. What is evident, however, is that people move, and will continue to move, regardless of the flow control policies of individual states. After a brief introduction providing the background to the study, the theoretical approach used by the authors is presented to describe the concept of induced human mobility seen primarily from a perspective of social justice. The chapter will then go on to analyse how international and EU policies have dealt with and regulate the migratory flows associated with forced migration, and to ascertain whether and to what extent such policies are effectively able to regulate such a complex phenomenon