Why India needs to urgently worry about migration caused by climate change

The significance of rural-urban migration will rise in future as agriculture-dependent livelihoods come under increasing climatic stress

The World Bank recently released an important report on climate change-induced migration, titled ‘Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration’. It covers three major regions of the world comprising Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), South Asia (SA) and Latin America (LA), and projects that by 2050 climate change could potentially cause 143 million additional people to migrate internally. The estimates for individual regions include 86 million, 40 million and 17 million for SSA, SA and LA, respectively.

There is a silver lining, however. These numbers represent a ‘pessimistic scenario’ and hold in case no action is taken. Under the other