How Environmental Change Relates to the Development of Adaptation Strategies and Migration Aspirations

The focus on perceived environmental changes and risks is a necessary precondition before people’s vulnerabilities and abilities to migrate can be taken into account (Adam 2005). This approach contrasts with previous research on environmental migration that has mainly focused on the vulnerabilities of people towards environmental changes. This vulnerability approach is, for instance, widely used in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014) and refers to the potential loss or harm one encounters or could encounter when facing environmental changes. This vulnerability is assumed to depend on the nature of the physical risks one could be exposed to and inherent sensitivity one has. The latter refers, for instance, to the type of economic activities of a community. For example, communities that rely heavily on agricultural activities are more sensitive to water scarcity and suffer more from drought, than other communities. It is within this framework that migration is often seen as a potential adaptation strategy to deal with environmental changes (Smit and Wandel 2006; Gemenne 2010). However, this framework hardly considers people’s own perceived vulnerabilities or risks or resilience towards environmental change. Hence, this vulnerability approach diminishes the agency of the actors involved and their active role in the development of migration aspirations and trajectories related to environmental changes and risks. Furthermore, as already stated by McLeman et al. (2016), the use of this framework of adaptation and the focus on the use of vulnerability may not encompass all drivers of environmental migration. This could certainly apply to the Moroccan context in which environmental changes mostly occur gradually and are to a lesser extent immediately visible to the human eye.