Planned Relocation Webinar: Lessons Learned in Environmental Displacement

Climate change and the extreme weather events it intensifies, are today and will continue to be the largest catalyst for migration worldwide. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center estimates that the number of new displacements associated with weather events will reach 22 million for 2019, making it the worst years for weather-related disaster displacement since records began.

Join the Migration in Harmony Reserach Coordnation Network for this webinar to learn what support is, and is not available, to communities are relocating away from environmental hazards. Migraiton experts Dr. Elizabeth Ferris, Sanjula Weerasinghe, and Erica Bower will share their experiences working with the International Organizaiton for Migration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the World Bank to create international guidance and toolkits for planned community relocations, and discuss lessons learned for future relocations in a climate changed world.

Migration In Harmony is an international, cross-disciplinary network of Arctic migration researchers funded by the National Science Foundation. Learn more and sign up at https://mailchi.mp/georgetown/migrationinharmony.

Dr. Elizabeth Ferris is an ISIM Research Professor at Georgetown and a non-resident senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. Her current research interests focus on the politics of humanitarian action and on the role of civil society in protecting displaced populations. She previously served as Senior Advisor to the UN General Assembly’s Summit for Refugees and Migrants and spent 20 years working in the field of humanitarian assistance. Sanjula Weerasinghe is a non-resident Fellow at ISIM and a consultant with UNHCR. Her recent experience includes work with the Migrants in Countries in Crisis Initiative Secretariat, where she was the lead secretariat drafter of the Initiative Guidelines to Protect Migrants in Countries Experiencing Conflict or Natural Disaster. Erica Bower is a PhD candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on how people make decisions on the move in climate change contexts, and understanding the conditions under which voluntary migration can be a strategy for climate change adaptation.Previously, she was a Climate Displacement Policy specialist at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.