May 4, 2025 | Yala Maya Kendra, Patan Dhoka
As Nepal continues to grapple with the intensifying impacts of climate change, understanding its complex relationship with migration has become more urgent than ever. On May 4, 2025 (Baisakh 21, 2082), Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS) convened a dialogue at Yala Maya Kendra, Patan Dhoka, to reflect and unpack the methodological and conceptual challenges of researching climate-induced mobility. The dialogue was part of the project CLIMIG – A New Interdisciplinary Framework for Studying the Relation between Climate Change and Migration, a comparative research initiative spanning Nepal, Bhutan, Ethiopia and Peru. The project is hosted by the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, in affiliation with the Department of Earth Sciences and the Centre on Global Migration to understand climate-migration links in nuanced and contextual ways. The event brought together researchers and practitioners from Nepal and beyond, offering critical reflections and potential pathways forward and served as a platform to explore the dilemmas of researching the relationship between climate and migration enabling knowledge exchange on climate and mobility in Nepal.
Key takeaways from the discussion:
- Beyond binaries – migration is rarely driven by climate change alone but emerges through intersecting factors such as socioeconomic and political precarity, development failures, gender norms, and cultural ties.
- Hybrid, interdisciplinary methodologies that value both local and scientific knowledge are essential. Speakers stressed the need to bridge quantitative climate data with qualitative insights like life and oral histories, gendered experiences, and vernacular expressions.
- Data limitations—especially in mountain regions—continue to hamper meaningful analysis. Calls were made for open-source tools, long-term datasets, and culturally grounded methods.
- Climate-migration linkages remain under-recognized in national climate policies and discourse.
- Displacement of livelihoods rather than just physical displacement of people offers a useful framework to entangle climate – migration linkages.
- There is an urgent need to rethink migration as an adaptive strategy, and centre justice and equity in both research and climate finance.
- Migration needs to be understood as a historical part of livelihood strategy, with seasonal migration forming a regular and established practice over time.
The way forward? Collaborative, grounded, and pluralistic research that reflects the sociocultural, political, and geographical textures of climate change and mobility.
Details of the event are captured below.
The session began with a welcome note from Dr. Gyanu Maskey, Thematic Lead – Climate at SIAS, who emphasized the need for ongoing discourse to interrogate the complex intersection of climate change and migration. Departing from a conventional academic format, the dialogue was structured as an open forum fostering researchers to reflect, question, and collaboratively navigate the dilemmas of linking climate and migration.
Prof. Dr. Andera Nightingale, University of Oslo, served as the chair for the event and set the tone emphasizing the objective of the dialogue was to co-create a safe space for mutual learning. The conversation revolved around key guiding questions, including:
- What does ‘climate change’ mean in your work? How do you assess sudden, extreme events, versus slow on-set changes when relating climate change to migration?
- What are the main causes of migration in your regions of focus? How do you link climate drivers with other drivers of migration?
- To what extent are you able to construct an historical understanding of migration from your focus regions? How does such a perspective (or lack of one) influence your interpretation of current data?
- What limitations do you face with your data? How reliable do you think the data you have available is? What techniques do you use to overcome problems of data gaps or reliability?
- To what extent do you find internal migration significant? What patterns do you see?
A range of national and international researchers offered rich insights into the interplay of climate and migration in the Nepali context and beyond.
Complex Realities and Gendered Impacts
Dr. Nani Sujakhu, Researcher at Institute for Study and Development (IFSD), Australia and co-author of an International Organization of Migration (IOM) study on the nexus between human security, climate change and gender, highlighted the layered effects of male outmigration through a comparative perspective from China, Nepal, and Bhutan. She focused on the gendered aspects of climate change and other migration drivers, particularly emphasizing how male outmigration leads to an increased physical and emotional burden on women, influencing significant school dropouts among girls to take on household responsibilities.
Dr. Sailesh Ranjitkar, an agroforestry specialist and another co-author of the IOM study, emphasized the growing role of slow-onset changes, such as soil degradation and changes in patterns, in pushing seasonal migration, particularly among western Nepali farmers. He underscored agroforestry as a viable adaptation strategy and shared a case of returnee migrants in Rasuwa, illustrating livelihood prospects as a strong determinant for mobility. Additionally, Dr. Ranjitkar also pointed to the value of early warning systems in minimizing disaster impacts and managing migration induced by climate hazards.
Blending Science and Local Knowledge
Asst. Prof. Dr. Jiban Poudel, Central Department of Anthropology, Tribhuvan University, reflected on the politics of knowledge production comparing the western scientific knowledge with tacit local and indigenous knowledge. He stressed that while long-term data (spanning 30+ years) is crucial to define climate change scientifically, local communities provide crucial insights through agricultural calendars, crop cycles and animal behavior. He argued, although local communities may not understand technical terms like “climate change,” their knowledge is based on lived experience and often expressed in local linguistics and vernaculars, such as personification of weather patterns. He also highlighted the cultural connotations of migration wherein many communities resist relocation due to the potential loss of cultural identity and the stigma attached to being labelled as “displaced” or “disaster victims.” He further advocated for hybrid knowledge systems that integrate quantitative scientific data with qualitative sociocultural observations.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Menuka Maharjan, Institute of Forestry (IOF), Tribhuvan University, pointed to significant data limitations in Nepal’s mountain regions, particularly the challenges of working with inconsistent and unreliable datasets. Referring to an IOF study that primarily used temperature and rainfall data, she noted its limitations in drawing meaningful conclusions due to the lack of consistent data spanning the full 30-year period required for comprehensive climate analysis. In terms of perception-based climate data, she proposed five-year time frame to be more suitable. Dr. Maharjan also recommended utilizing open-source data platforms to obtain relatively more accurate results than interpolated methodology for climate data. Her views were echoed by Mr. Sanjaya Khatri, a researcher at SIAS, who underscored the importance of interdisciplinary approached, particularly for capturing climate dynamics at the local scale.
Beyond borders and definitions
Ms. Simran Silpakar, a Gender Equality and Inclusion Analyst at ICIMOD, emphasized the significance of internal migration in Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, underlining the ties between climate change and migration patterns. She reflected on life histories to be an insightful method, particularly to understand sociocultural aspects of climate and migration. Presenting the example of Bhutan, she highlighted how spiritual beliefs around mountains shape the understanding of climate change. She also highlighted the voluntary and involuntary aspects of immobility influenced by place attachment and socioeconomic influences.
Mr. Obindra Bikram Chand, a PhD scholar at the University of Exeter, discussed methodological complexities relating to how the concept of “Jalvayu Parivartan” (climate change) is understood and implemented in real life. He critiqued the dominance of pollution-focused narratives and stressed the need to examine how climate impacts intersect with disability and displacement, especially among marginalized and vulnerable groups. He questioned the accessibility of early warning systems for people with disabilities and highlighted the lack of broader thematic discussions beyond climate change itself in Nepal’s policy and academic spaces.
Rethinking Development, Migration and Adaptation
Dr Lal Bahadur Pun, Senior Research Fellow at Kathmandu University, provided a methodological insight to understand migration from the destination perspective in order to supplement a holistic understanding. He also questioned the prevailing understanding of replacing traditional agricultural systems with modern techniques brought by returnee migrants. Using the analogy of using high yielding varieties (HYVs) versus traditional seeds, he argued that the principle of replacement is flawed in the former, and instead, methodologies should focus on promotion and preservation of indigenous knowledge. He stressed the need for “people’s methodologies” that enables an equitable approach towards listening to local voices to truly understand and address structural issues.
Prof. Dr Jeevan Raj Sharma, Co-Director of Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, pointed to conceptual ambiguities stating that there is no direct translation of the word ‘migration’ in Nepali. He urged for a broader conceptualization of climate and migration which also incorporates the climate impacts faced by migrants at destinations, particularly on aspects of health and wellbeing. He also recommended understanding climate-induced displacement, particularly of sudden extreme events, not just as physical relocation of people but also as the loss of livelihoods and social relations, such as farming, herding, or fishing, which provides a useful framework to understand climate-induced migration. He emphasized that this form of displacement is complex and multidimensional, and cautioned against relying solely on indicators like rainfall or temperature and advocated for integrated approaches that reflect the diverse impacts of climate change across scales.
Dr. Dilli Poudel, Thematic Lead-Urban and Disaster, SIAS, echoed this sentiment by noting that climate-induced migration should be reframed as a livelihood shift. He highlighted how disasters and increasing pressures on food systems push people to move, yet such responses are deeply rooted in Nepal’s long history of adapting to ecological diversity. He called for greater academic and policy focus on these everyday realities, particularly from the perspective of farmers and rural resource users.
Interconnected events and attributional challenges
Dr. Alice Millington, Post Doctoral Researcher, University of Oxford, shared reflections from Taplejung where it remains difficult to definitively trace migration to climate change alone. While three major glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) between 1960s and 1980s destroyed agricultural land and influenced mobility patterns, the question of attributing the GLOFs to climate change remains uncertain. Furthermore, she reflected on how political decisions and market shifts affecting cross-border yak trade with China accentuated migration trends in the region. Dr. Millington’s analogy shed a light on how migration is rarely caused by climate alone, but rather shaped by intersecting factors of environmental disruption, economic opportunity, and political decisions over time.
Reflecting on these conversations, Prof. Dr. Nightingale emphasized the need to expand the migration discourse beyond the movement of people to include the transformation of livelihoods and landscapes. She posed a critical question about the global climate change discourse: what message can be conveyed when lived experiences clearly reflect change, yet climate attribution remains uncertain? Her reflections called for more grounded, nuanced, and locally attuned interpretations.
Governmental negligence and on-ground dynamics
Mr. Kushal Gurung, the Chief Executive Officer of Wind Power Nepal, discussed the migration trends from river valleys, often exacerbated by climate change. He further pointed to a lack of governmental acknowledgement of migration – climate linkages and highlighted its absence from key climate change related policies and plans such as the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) 3.0 and Nepal’s Sixteenth Plan.
Mr. Kunja Shrestha, Researcher, SIAS, reflected on the impact of slow onset of events are often guised under economic challenges, making it difficult to meaningfully link to climate change. He further emphasized how notions of equity and justice, especially in the current climate change discourse, increasingly translate to delivering loss and damage funds to affected populations. However, this presents an ethical dilemma for qualitative researchers who resist reducing lived experiences to quantifiable metrics shaped by Western scientific paradigms.
Dr. Gyanu Maskey, SIAS, shared brief insights from the CLIMIG research in Lamjung, where slow and sudden onset events such as droughts and floods are linked to migration, changing land use, human-forest boundaries, and influencing human-wildlife conflict. She also observed how place attachment intersects with emerging rural-urban migration patterns, demonstrating the entanglement of human mobilities.
Conclusion: Towards Collaborative Knowledge and Policy
In closing remarks, Prof. Dr. Nightingale, reflected on how migration being seen as an outcome of failed development provides a crucial insight, and must be integrated into development strategies as a legitimate adaptive response. She highlighted the potential for collaborative knowledge creation, even within institutional spaces such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) if there is a genuine commitment to engage with grounded realities.
Across the discussion, participants emphasized that understanding climate change and migration requires moving beyond disciplinary silos and simplistic metrics. Throughout the discussion, practical challenges faced by researchers during fieldwork and climate data gaps were brought up, emphasizing the need for innovative methodological approaches. Whether through life histories, ethnography, or interdisciplinary research, the dialogue revealed the urgent need for integrative approaches that honor both scientific and lived knowledge. As Nepal and its neighbors face growing climate challenges, attention to the social, cultural, and political dimensions of mobility is more essential than ever.
