Climate-induced migration: Exploring local perspectives in Kiribati Lacey Allgood and Karen E. McNamara School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Australia Correspondence: Karen E McNamara (email: karen.mcnamara@uq.edu.au) A number of studies have indicated that the long term habitability of Kiribati, a low-lying country in the central tropical Pacific Ocean, is tenuous given the impacts of climate change, particularly sea level rise. In an effort to plan for the resultant challenges ahead, a number of national policies and programs have surfaced to reduce the impact of localized changes on people’s livelihoods. This study explores how local community members (n = 60) have taken it upon themselves to respond to the impacts of climate change by utilizing a number of different strategies. The results highlight that: first, respondents consider climate change to be the most concerning issue for sustaining their livelihoods; second, respondents have built physical defences, relocated temporarily or permanently, and sought government assistance to adapt to localized climate-related impacts; and third, the majority of respondents indicated that they would migrate as a long term strategy to respond to the future impacts of climate change. Keywords: climate change, community, Kiribati, migration, risk Accepted: 9 December 2016 Introduction The relationship between environmental change and migration heralds from a long lineage. For instance, in the 1970s, Lester Brown and others wrote about the southward expansion of the Sahel and Dust Bowl in the United States to describe the links between migration and environmental problems (see Brown, 1975; Brown et al., 1976). Many of these seemingly straightforward arguments at the time — that agricultural industries could not support population growth as a consequence of unequal land tenure systems and environmental degradation — were based around Malthusian concerns (see Malthus, 1798). This work by Brown, who founded the Worldwatch Institute, was among the first to popularize the links between environmental change and migration. Since then, ever- increasing scores of research and recommendations for policy and institutional frameworks have flourished in an attempt to document, better understand and best protect those experiencing these transitions. One prominent example has been the work of the Nansen Initiative from 2012–16 which has focused on developing a protection agenda for those that have been affected by disasters and climate change and are displaced across borders. Over time, this growing body of work has resulted in multiple and diverse ways of framing ‘environmental migration’ (see Ransan-Cooper et al., 2015; Mayer, 2014 for analysis of this), fuelled in part by the way this complex phenomenon has attempted to be understood. The impacts of anthropogenic climate change have fuelled discussions on the links between environmental change and migration. Low-lying islands in particular have featured prominently in these discussions given their topography, precarious supply of and access to freshwater resources, and high susceptibility to natural disasters (recent studies include for example, Connell, 2016; Constable, 2016; Stojanov et al., 2016). Despite emitting negligible amounts of greenhouse gases in comparison to developed doi:10.1111/sjtg.12202 Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography •• (2017) ••–•• © 2017 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd