On May 15 and 16, UBC Health assembled researchers, practitioners, and community members together to explore how research supports action within the health sector. The Climate Solutions Research Collective and Faculty of Applied Science came together to highlight how our changing climate impacts migration and health outcomes for migrants.
Jemima Nomunume Baada, PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, shared her experience as an interdisciplinary climate-migration scholar conducting research and teaching at the intersections of gender, climate change, migration and health.
Her research started by examining the experiences of climate change by individuals who migrate in both origin and destination communities. Food insecurity, extreme heat events, and infectious disease transmission are some of the climate-related drivers of migration. In destination communities, migrants experience physical exertion, poor reproductive outcomes, poor social outcomes, and broader medical challenges.
The combination of these leads to heightened distress, where coping strategies tend to be gendered.
For example, substance use (in particular alcohol) appears to be a major coping strategy predominantly among men. This has serious implications for household members, including gender-based violence and intimate partner violence. Her ongoing research explores how to make sense of the relationship between climate-induced poor livelihood outcomes and alcohol use and what interventions can be put in place to promote healthy coping. Dr. Baada is further exploring how climate change and migration simultaneously shape psychoscocial health, with a particular emphasis on mental health.
Dr. Baada emphasized that research on migration and climate change has been slow to respond to the climate crisis.
While we have seen issues related to a changing climate globally for decades, research is only beginning to scratch the surface of the critical intersections of how health, health policy and climate change drive groups into very challenging spaces. In particular, gender, race, and socioeconomic status come together to impact populations facing these challenges differently.
Shahin Kassam, PhD, RN, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with UBC’s School of Nursing in Capacity: The Centre for Research in Community Engagement and Gender Equity, brought her intersectionality-framed, community-based research lens and her experience as a technical advisor for organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) to the discussion.
She shared her work exploring the experience of climate change for women living at the intersections of racism, gender-based violence, and forced migration. She emphasized the importance of establishing shared and inclusive vocabulary. For example, she uses the term forced migration in her work, rather than climate migration because the reasons for migration can be complex and individuals may not see themselves as ‘climate migrants’ when there are multiple structural forces impacting decisions. The broader term of forced migration includes anyone who chooses to see themselves as threatened by interconnecting factors and are subsequently forced to move away from their livelihoods. These factors are commonly described globally as persecution, conflict, and human rights violations. As it relates to climate, these threats also include socioeconomic, sociocultural, ideological, and sociopolitical factors, which may not be as clearly apparent and go beyond extreme heat or drought. Examining experiences of climate change and climate migration within the axes of gender, racism, sexism, and migration status is an example of how we can expose, address, and tackle overlooked and underexamined climate change-induced injustices. Definitions are also critical when it comes to equitable support. International and national policies tend to channel people into migration categories that impact the type of support available, ultimately leading to inequity.
Dr. Kassam also summarized what is known about the relationship between health and climate change from Health Canada’s 2022 report “Health of Canadians in a Changing Climate”.
She shared her own emerging community-based work in Terrace, BC, connecting directly with local non-profit organizations and health and social services to understand how women living with forced migration statuses access social and health systems. Dr. Kassam provided an example of how the local settlement organization in Terrace, BC, Skeena Diversity, partners often with Indigenous community service groups including the Kermode Friendship Center to foster community engagement and inclusion among women living with migration and Indigenous backgrounds together. The program evolved to address food security, and creative ways to access culturally appropriate and traditional food, especially during climate change-induced crises. Wildfires and flooding are examples of such crises that often cause road closures and interrupt food transportation to remote communities such as Terrace.
Dr. Kassam also discussed the WHO’s new Department of Health and Migration Priorities. She expressed the need for national adaptation plans to actively engage and reflect the experiences of migrants, displaced populations, and host communities. Investing in a migrant-inclusive health system includes: 1) advancing evidence-based policies through community-engagement with diverse groups of women living with forced migration; 2) fostering multi-sectoral collaboration to address the triple nexus of health, climate change and migration, and 3) building and leveraging partnership approaches for community-centered solutions.
The audience engaged in a lively discussion of how Canada can prepare for climate migration, understanding that migration may occur globally or regionally.
Recent events, such as the Lytton wildfire of 2021 that destroyed the entire community, the atmospheric river events in Bristish Columbia of 2021 that impacted multiple regions across the province through flooding, road washouts and landslides, as well as the very recent Jasper wildfire of 2024, remind us that migration as a result of climate impacts is occurring locally as well. There was an emphasis on the need for better infrastructure to support migration and migrants as well as a need to address the structural issues that make adaptation challenging. For example, investments into housing that is resilient, or climate science that looks to address broader root causes, or even how the use of specific terms (like ‘climate migrant’ which is not a legally recognized term) risk excluding people from services.
A participant shared the need to collaborate on exploring how health systems can be reimagined to include these evolving pressures.
Some participants noted Population Data BC (PopDataBC) as an available resource for use in research and implementations, with others noting that it is valuable to have data that is further stratified to include diversity within populations that are currently aggregated. There was a collective sense for more platforms for researchers, policy makers, educations, community leaders from multi-disciplinary backgrounds to come together for knowledge exchange and implementation of results.
Calls to Action:
- Continuous multi-sectoral examinations from an intersectionality perspective how and why climate change-induced migration efforts are persistently and inequitably affecting the health of certain groups (e.g.: women who are racialized)
- Identifying what infrastructure is in place (or not) in the event of slow-onset climate change and extreme weather events and how this infrastructure is inclusive to priority populations (ie: Indigenous peoples, low-income populations, immigrants, refugees, racialized communities, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and people with disabilities, those living in rural and remote communities - as per Canadian Public Health Association)
- Building sustainable, long-term, reciprocal relationships between non-profit-organizations serving these populations, researchers across disciplines, policymakers, and those with lived and living experience
- Co-developing intersectionality-framed research agendas with these relationships to co-create community-led, inclusive research processes
- Generating datasets through these research agendas that are broken down/stratified by gender, race, migration status, socioeconomic locations, health inequities stemmed by climate change (both slow onset and extreme-weather-event related)
- Catalyzing community-led models of adaptation to climate change-induced migration
Do you have a suggestion for a Climate+Health Conversation? Reach out to the Climate Solutions Research Collective. Stay connected with us, UBC Health, and UBC Applied Science for upcoming events, discussions, and funding opportunities.
Looking for more information? Check out these resources shared during the Climate Conversation.
Reading:
- Check our Health Canada’s Report Health of Canadians in a Changing Climate (2022) which is available in both English and French.
- The World Health Organization’s evidence brief Strengthening health systems to improve the health of displaced and migrant populations in the context of climate change (2024) highlights how migration and displacement due to climate change are expected to present new health challenges.
- Dr. Kassam recommends exploring “The Intersectional Environmentalist” (2022) by Leah Thomas.
- PopulationDataBC is a repository of data available for researchers.
At UBC:
- Check out the UBC Centre for Migration Studies to explore research and learning opportunities, including the 2025-26 Graduate Certificate in Migration Studies which is accepting applications until June 23, 2025.
- The UBC Centre for Climate Justice also has resources, events, and learning opportunities.