Migration and sustainable development

Abstract

To understand the implications of migration for sustainable development requires a comprehensive consideration of a range of population movements and their feedback across space and time. This Perspective reviews emerging science at the interface of migration studies, demography, and sustainability, focusing on consequences of migration flows for nature-society interactions including on societal outcomes such as inequality; environmental causes and consequences of involuntary displacement; and processes of cultural convergence in sustainability practices in dynamic new populations. We advance a framework that demonstrates how migration outcomes result in identifiable consequences on resources, environmental burdens and well-being, and on innovation, adaptation, and challenges for sustainability governance. We elaborate the research frontiers of migration for sustainability science, explicitly integrating the full spectrum of regular migration decisions dominated by economic motives through to involuntary displacement due to social or environmental stresses. Migration can potentially contribute to sustainability transitions when it enhances well-being while not exacerbating structural inequalities or compound uneven burdens on environmental resources.

Keywords: demographic change; migration; mobility; natural resources; sustainable development.

Fig. 1.

Trends in stocks of migrants globally with trends in displacement from natural hazards: (A) Immigrants (million) as at 2020 (7); (B) International migrants (million) (left axis) and as proportion of global population (right axis) (1990 to 2020); (C) Aggregate flow of people displaced internally within their own countries in each year (2008 to 2021) (8) (D) Estimated causes of internal displacements involving natural hazards in 2021 (excludes involuntary refugee migration from conflict) (8).

Fig. 2.

How migration affects the NSS and their future trajectories: The interplay of macrolevel structures, place-based processes, and individual level decisions (modified from ref. 1).