Rising Seas in Southeast Asia

Floods vastly outnumber weather disasters of all other types—and disasters are hitting vulnerable coastal regions more often, with climate change driving higher sea levels and extreme weather. As a coastal nation, the Philippines ranks third among the world’s countries most vulnerable to weather-related risk.

A pole in Malabon, Philippines is painted with flood measurement markers.

Following decades of research in the Philippines, Migrations lab member Lindy Williams, professor of global development, has witnessed the effects on public safety in two cities in the provinces of Luzon and Bulacan .

In a November 2020 article in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Williams and her colleagues profile these coastal communities as they face the risks and consequences of frequent flooding.“Many people say that climate migration is down the road. We wanted to see if that was true in these communities and how people were thinking about it,” says Williams.

She and her team collected data over the course of two years, engaging with a range of community members including local residents, government officials, flood evacuation workers, and health workers. Each stakeholder offered a different perspective, allowing Williams and her team to dig deeper into the history and experiences of the communities.

The researchers found that government officials and residents generally agree about the serious problems the towns face. “They gave quite consistent answers,” says Williams.

They cited widespread and ongoing problems like garbage in waterways that contaminate water, safety concerns related to evacuation, negative health effects from flooding, saltwater incursion from routine tidal flooding, and tidal incursion affecting burial options.

Responses to Flooding

Despite these problems, “climate-driven migration is not yet widespread,” Williams said. “It is on a lot of people’s minds, but is not currently the main risk mitigation strategy they are trying to engage."

Ties to family and friends and community familiarity continue to motivate most people to stay. In the recent article, Williams writes, “Most focus group participants had a strong sense of place and occupational attachment, and said that if they had the money they would prefer to use it to elevate or otherwise modify their current homes than to move away.”

Staying often involved demanding adaptions, such as changing livelihoods, taking on extensive infrastructure projects to elevate homes, and relying on both the government and peers in the community for aid. Through installations of flood gates, walls to block water, and drainage system cleaning, members of both communities worked to remain in place amid evolving risk.

Thus far, retreat has not been managed in a systematic way.

People who did opt to migrate to safer localities often left suddenly—and only when climate impacts grew to an intolerable level. “Thus far, retreat has not been managed in a systematic way,” Williams said. During field visits, she and her team were shown abandoned housing in standing water that still held ruined belongings.

One set of families who had been at heightened risk of flooding due to their proximity to the river had been relocated to other communities that could offer housing and employment. During her next visit to the field, however, Williams learned that most of the families had moved back.

Primary among the reasons cited for their return moves was missing the home community. This raises a new set of questions about the complex factors that influence migration, as well as about potential conflicts within neighborhoods that accept climate migrants. Williams’s ongoing research is urgently needed, as other research suggests that the Philippines is expected to experience a five- to tenfold increase in the number of people living below the projected high-tide line. 

Photo courtesy of Lindy Williams from her field work in the Philippines.

Flooding and Inequity

Conversations with participants show that reluctance to move is linked to complex social, political, and economic realities. Community members mentioned not having enough money, not having the capacity to move, or being unsure about where they would live.

As often happens with migration patterns, said Williams, people who have resources fare better. They can leave and have other places to go. If they stay, those who have sufficient financial resources can build second stories on their homes, add layers to their ground-level flooring, or make other home modifications. Those with limited means, however, are often unable to make even minor modifications to their homes that could reduce their exposure to flooding events.

Lindy Williams with the research team and local officials in Malabon, Philippines.

As one research participant noted: “If the person has money, then he will raise his house up. If you don’t have the money, then you have to suck it up and deal with what you have.”

“Those who made good money left the community,” said another. “They moved to another place.”

The people that remain in place face onset rising sea levels and minor flood occurrences, in addition to more intense flooding events and disaster. Unsurprisingly, the poorest people are often most adversely affected, according to Williams.

During more intense flooding events, authorities often call for local residents to evacuate. However, many people reported resistance to evacuation because they fear that their homes might be looted. Some families evacuate but leave behind one member who keeps an eye on the home and belongings.

Evacuation has likely become even more complicated in recent months, according to Williams’s article, with the “2019 novel coronavirus raising new questions regarding the costs and benefits of taking shelter in crowded evacuation centers.”

Flood Risk and COVID-19

More recently, Williams began working with John Zinda, assistant professor of global development, senior extension associates Robin Blakely-Armitage and David Kay, and graduate student Sarah Alexander to similarly study perceptions of flood risk closer to home—in Troy, New York, a city on the Hudson River.

The coronavirus is raising new questions regarding the costs and benefits of taking shelter in crowded evacuation centers.

When the pandemic hit, the researchers decided to include questions on COVID-19 in a survey that was about to go out as a way to gauge how perceptions of flood risks and pandemic risks relate to one another and how they each shape behavioral responses.

In a new 750-household questionnaire, questions about flooding and the pandemic examine how people assess risk and respond to it. The team also collected demographic data, as well as information on preferred news sources and political affiliation, to allow them to understand any correlation between these factors and perceptions of risk and associated behavior. 

In preliminary research, the team has identified a number of reasons for low uptake of flood insurance. They are now hoping to contribute further to knowledge about flood risk, risk perception, and adaptive measures taken along the Hudson in New York State, and eventually beyond. 

By Megan DeMint for Global Cornell

Lindy Williams is a professor of global development at Cornell University and a member of the Cornell Migrations lab. She conducts research primarily in Southeast Asia and North America, with interests in the areas of family sociology and population studies and the importance of changing social, economic, and environmental conditions in relation to both. 

Williams received her doctorate in sociology from Brown University in 1987. Her early research focused on reproductive health and family dynamics in Southeast Asia and the United States. She joined Cornell in 1993. Her recent collaborative work has focused mainly on migration: labor migration systems in Thailand, effects of overseas labor migration on families from the Philippines, and uneven returns to migration for those with and without citizenship. Her current research examines exposure to coastal flooding in the Philippines and adaptation to that risk. She is also working with a team of researchers assessing flood risk and adaption in Upstate New York.

Looking for Win-Win Outcomes for People and Planet

For Amanda Rodewald, migratory birds are emblematic of a world on the move. In one year, a single warbler may spend 80 days in boreal forests in Canada, 30 days in the United States, resting and refueling during migration, and more than 200 days in Central America.

Migratory patterns of 118 migratory birds across the Western Hemisphere, based on data from eBird. Each dot shows the centroid of a species distribution on a given day. LaSorte, et al., 2016

Neotropical migratory birds, which breed in North America and winter in Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, are of special interest to Rodewald, an ecologist and conservation biologist. She and her colleagues study birds and the ecosystems on which they depend in order to understand their needs and movements, the impact of human activities and global change on their populations, and ways that we can safeguard the healthy environments they—and we—require.

As part of her work, Rodewald looks for win-win outcomes for people and the planet, and this turned her attention to coffee farms.

Growing coffee under trees—a practice called shade-grown coffee—results in a wide variety of social and environmental benefits.

As she explains, “Whether you care about supporting the livelihoods of farmers, conserving biodiversity, maintaining productive and healthy environments, or enjoying a great-tasting cup of coffee, it all points to shade-grown coffee.” 

Coffee and Sustainable Ecosystems

Many migratory birds spend the winter on shade-coffee farms, and they can return to the same farms year after year. But widespread deforestation and agricultural intensification has reduced the amount of suitable habitat for migrating birds and other species. As forests were cleared and as the traditional practice of growing coffee under shade trees gave way to environmentally harmful monocultures of “sun coffee,” migratory birds have suffered. Rodewald says, for example, that the population of one vulnerable songbird species, the small blue-and-white Cerulean Warbler, has declined by 70 percent in the past 50 years, coinciding with the widespread conversion of shade to sun coffee.

“I advocate for the use of science in planning, policy, and decision-making processes.”

Fortunately, shade coffee is starting to make a comeback.

In addition to the idea that more shade-grown coffee farms would be beneficial for birds, Rodewald’s collaborative research is helping show co-benefits for farmers and their families. Trees improve soil health and farm conditions, and the shade-grown coffee beans produced are a higher quality, which can bring the farmer a higher price. With the forest acting as natural fertilizer, there is little need for chemicals, which is a positive impact on water quality. Forests are sustained, not cut down. Coffee plants grown under trees produce beans for two or three times longer than sun-grown coffee plants.

A Blackburnian warbler on a coffee branch. Photo by G. Santos

“We’re focused on finding ways to conserve species and protect biodiversity,” she says. “To do that, we need to understand the migratory patterns of birds. We also need to understand the social and economic choices that people make, and what the full impacts of those choices are. Then we can recommend sustainable solutions—changes to systems and resources and incentives at local and global scales—that will contribute to the health of the planet for all species.”

Rodewald integrates her research and outreach efforts to inform policy and management. She regularly interacts with government agencies, conservation organizations, and private landowners.

“I advocate for the use of science in planning, policy, and decision-making processes,” she says.

It was her childhood love of the outdoors that first got Rodewald interested in the bigger issues she studies now. “My love of being outside seeded a very deep thinking about conservation, and that led me to develop an ethic for stewarding the planet,” she says.

Holistic Views Can Lead to Workable Solutions

Rodewald’s research naturally touches on a variety of sub-disciplines: conservation biology, community ecology, landscape ecology, population demography, behavioral ecology, ecological restoration, and sustainability science. “This may surprise people, but some of our most important partners here at Cornell are in the social sciences, including economics and business,” she says.

In the five-minute video Conservation Science and Shade-Grown Coffee by Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, Amanda Rodewald explains how conservation can work for people and the planet.

“The interdisciplinary thinking that my research team gains from these collaborations,” Rodewald explains, “helps us focus on the broader ecosystem: What are people’s needs? What drives their decisions? What are the kinds of incentives that we can use for interventions that might help them make choices that support their families and their communities but also are positive steps for the environment as well?”

“Some of our most important partners here at Cornell are in the social sciences, including economics and business.”

“We can make improvements and shift outcomes to support biodiversity if we focus on human decisions and actions—needs, drivers, incentives, interventions,” she says. “Forest restoration, habitat management, sustainable agricultural practices—all of these can be workable solutions. If we want to fully understand the realities and the possibilities for change, then we need to be taking a more holistic view of the interactions of all the players in the ecosystem.”

Migrations research takes these connections into consideration—humans, animals, plants, nonliving things.

“Until you have the spark that actually moves research from ideas to action, nothing happens,” Rodewald says. “The Migrations global grand challenge is going to help move people into action, people who maybe have ideas that have been lying in wait for the right opportunity. It is a spark to generate connections.”

A priority of the Migrations initiative is to facilitate new collaborative projects.

“We’ll be funding faculty and student projects that will demonstrate how to work in interdisciplinary space,” Rodewald, a co-chair of the Migrations taskforce, explains. “This will make explicit the connections, the causes, and consequences. It will give us, as researchers, a more holistic view. There is power in that systems-level approach.”

That type of collaboration is paramount to Rodewald.

“I’m personally interested in working across boundaries to identify some points of connection,” she says, “along with evidence-based strategies that reflect community values and worldviews—and that can be applied in the real world.”

Ducks in a wetlands area

In a new collaboration with Ivan Rudik (assistant professor in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at the Cornell S.C. Johnson College of Business), Alison Johnston (research associate at the Lab of Ornithology), and Catherine Kling (Tisch University Professor in Dyson), Rodewald will study the Farm Bill’s Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers for taking farmland out of rotation.

“We will quantify the ways in which the program contributes to bird conservation,” she says, “and provides other benefits such as clean air and water, habitat protection, and recreation.” They’ll also investigate how benefits might flow across states, changing with enrollment patterns, and moving with migratory birds.

In another project led by Filiz Garip (professor of sociology in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences), Rodewald and colleagues focus on human movement ecology. They study how different environmental shocks or changing climates in Mexico affect individual decisions about migrating, and ultimately aims to inform policy and humanitarian efforts.

“Finding working solutions to real-world problems is both a challenge and a fascination for me,” Rodewald says. “Through authentic ways, how can we increase caring and therefore positive action? It’s about building empathy.”

by Jeri Wall for Global Cornell

Banding a bird in Colombia. Photo by G. Santos

Amanda D. Rodewald (PhD, Pennsylvania State University) is the Garvin Professor of Ornithology in the Department of Natural Resources in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and senior director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She is a faculty fellow at Cornell's Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, an affiliate faculty member at the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, a member of the Cornell graduate field of natural resources, and co-chair of the Migrations Taskforce.

Rodewald is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Ornithological Society. She has provided national leadership and service to U.S. federal agencies, including testifying to Congress as well as over a decade of service with the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She has a strong record of publication for scientific and lay audiences: more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 10 book chapters or edited volumes, and more than 50 op-eds or popular articles.

A Bill of Rights for Migrants

In a world on the move, what can international lawyers do to safeguard the rights of all migrants?

Ian Kysel, visiting assistant clinical professor teaching in Cornell Law School's Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic, brought the International Migrants’ Bill of Rights (IMBR) initiative to Cornell in July 2019, continuing a project that began at Georgetown University in 2008. The IMBR is both a global collaboration supporting human rights research and advocacy and a nonbinding declaration of basic human rights for people who cross borders for any reason.

Sign at rally in Seattle.

The project takes a new approach to expanding protections for migrants. Kysel and Georgetown colleague T. Alexander Aleinikoff recognized that existing treaty law already provides a basic level of rights protection, but is often challenged by states and ignored in practice. So Kysel and a team of law students—which soon expanded beyond Georgetown Law to include faculty and law students across institutions and borders—drafted the IMBR as a comprehensive “soft-law” tool designed to be informally adopted by nation-states and international or regional organizations. Key IMBR principles include:

• Every migrant has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before law.
• Every migrant has the right to an effective remedy.
• Every migrant has the right to liberty and security of person.

The bill of rights is accompanied by legal commentaries identifying the sources for each provision in existing law and practice. The IMBR is not a legally binding document, although many of the human rights it restates are drawn from widely-ratified treaties. It is intended to focus public attention on migrants' entitlements in the international sphere.

Kysel says, "For me, the IMBR is a constant reminder of the power of student-led activism and research to make an impact."

Expanding the Migration Vocabulary

Evidence of this impact came at the end of 2019, when the human rights arm of the Organization of American States—the world's oldest regional organization, uniting all 35 independent nations of the Americas—adopted a version of the IMBR. The 80 principles in the resolution of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, called the Inter-American Principles on the Human Rights of all Migrants, Refugees, Stateless Persons, and Victims of Human Trafficking, arguably represent the most comprehensive articulation of the rights of all migrants ever adopted by an international body.

By carving out a common language for advocacy, the IMBR has become a tool that can be incorporated at the national level through amicus briefs, litigation, and public comments on changes in regulations or legislation. An important next step for the project is building broader partnerships with civil society, states, and international organizations to expand adoption of the IMBR's soft-law framework.

While every state may not be compelled by these arguments, Kysel finds potential for growth among states that are. In these places, the IMBR project promotes practices consistent with existing law, strengthening recognition and solidification of international legal rights.

"I think being in an academic environment and having the opportunity to collaborate with Cornell's Migrations initiative is vital," Kysel says, "because it will allow us to work to expand the vocabulary that we use to talk about these kinds of protections."

A Database for Migrants' Rights

Refugees journeying from the coast of Libya crowded on a small vessel as they entered Italy in 2014.

The IMBR team's legal research initially focused on articulating how different areas of law—such as human rights law, refugee law, and labor law—apply to all international migrants and refugees. In some locations, migrants are protected at an even higher level. The IMBR highlights these areas of progressive development to encourage nation-states to expand their view of the law and strengthen the worldwide architecture of protection. Now the team is at work on developing the first migrant rights database. The database will use fixed indicators to code and evaluate how effectively states are protecting migrants' rights and complying with international law.

The set of 65 indicators has been pilot tested by the World Bank's Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, with the first findings published in the journal International Migration. Kysel's team is working with funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation to expand the coding to 35 cases.

"Our goal is to create a policy-relevant tool that can be implemented relatively quickly," says Kysel. "But nothing like this tool currently exists."

"The migrant rights database will be a vital baseline for evaluating how governance changes affect the protection of rights."

Kysel closely watches policy changes on the international level. The Global Compact on Refugees and Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration were both endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2018. The two compacts are nonbinding but represent the most significant recent U.N. effort to promote more cohesive governance of migration and refugees. The United Nations also recently created a U.N. Network on Migration to coordinate implementation and promote data-driven migration policy and planning.

"As these initiatives continue to bring more harmony to the field, we think that the migrant rights database will be a vital baseline for evaluating how governance changes affect the protection of rights," Kysel says.

Old Frameworks, New Challenges

Kysel believes that one of the IMBR's key contributions is prompting conversations about how legal principles can accommodate new rights or norms, as changing conditions in the world push or pull more people across international borders.

Kysel and an international group of colleagues have just released a set of principles reminding states of their obligations to refugees and migrants during the coronavirus pandemic. More than 800 experts around the world signed on in April to support the statement.

"Recognizing the way that the new challenges can be met by complying with old frameworks is key," Kysel notes.

Kysel and his team treat asylum as a legal institution that provides protection to those with any basis for protection under international law. In this sense, asylum is not limited by the five grounds recognized in 1951 as part of the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees—race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion—but also about a right to seek and enjoy new forms of protection, such as protection for victims of trafficking or for those displaced by global climate change.

Thinking about migrants' rights in a broad way is a prerequisite to creating legal and policy change that will provide effective protection to meet new challenges, according to Kysel.

"Some states can seem, in the present moment, almost allergic to rights."

There are states that have long been champions of migrants' rights at the international level, but the current nationalist, xenophobic political dynamics in a number of countries create new obstacles for protecting migrants' rights.

"The biggest challenge is always from states," he says. "We have to think about how to overcome misconceptions that a bill of rights would inevitably undermine sovereignty, create new rights to which states haven't consented, or even create a right to migrate."

"These are just some of the ways in which some states can seem, in the present moment, almost allergic to rights," he observes.

Identifying and building on areas of consensus among a pool of states that are not dominated by xenophobic dynamics can help strengthen the global architecture of human rights as political dynamics shift. It's a step in the right direction for our world on the move.

By Claudia Ro and Megan DeMint for Global Cornell

Ian Kysel (LLM, JD, Georgetown University Law Center) is a visiting assistant clinical professor of law teaching in Cornell Law School's Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic. 

Kysel’s research interests lie in public and private international law, including international migration and human rights law, constitutional law, civil rights/civil liberties law, U.S. immigration law, and property law. His recent scholarship has focused on children’s rights and the rights of migrants. Kysel has published in the Georgetown Journal of International Law, New York University Journal of Law & Social Change, International Migration, and Journal on Migration and Human Security. He has written several human rights reports; his opinion articles have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Kysel has argued or participated in litigation before immigration, federal and state courts, and international tribunals. He has provided testimony to various legislative bodies and executive or international commissions. He currently sits on the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch’s Children’s Rights Division and is a co-organizer of the ACLU’s national Youth Justice Network.