The COVID-19 crisis has led to unprecedented disruption to the healthcare system and to economies and society, revealing the systemic fragility of our world. More recently, the war in Ukraine has seen a return to emergency conditions, causing a massive humanitarian crisis while threatening the world’s recovery. The effects of these geopolitical tensions have spread worldwide, and countries all over the globe are facing further disruption due to rising food and energy prices, inflationary pressures, disrupted supply chains, financial turbulence and so forth, while there are serious concerns that the plans to address climate change will be slowed or even abandoned in some parts of the planet. In this context, it is evident that conflicts and crises are increasing worldwide and more people than ever are being displaced, with a serious risk to their lives and future, and with a growing number of women and children being affected.

Against this background and such serious issues, we address the following questions: Are the current migration policies, especially those concerning forced migration, adequate to meet current challenges and opportunities? What guidelines will policy makers follow at European and global level if a clear framework for future policies for conflict- and environment-induced forced migration has not been properly laid down? Our contribution will thus investigate the link between external events such as conflict and climate change, and human mobility, while assessing how such movements could reinforce existing inequalities or create new imbalances, focusing especially on the gender gap. Moreover, while there is substantial agreement among scientists and scholars that climate is changing rapidly, the connections ¶{p. 268}between climate change and human mobility are not always very well explained or understood.

Forced migration is generally presented using sensationalistic and alarming predictions, promoting fear-based stories of waves of climate-induced migrants forced to relocate from their place of residence, eventually disembarking in Europe and North America. What is evident, however, is that people move, and will continue to move, regardless of the flow control policies of individual states.

After a brief introduction providing the background to the study, the theoretical approach used by the authors is presented to describe the concept of induced human mobility seen primarily from a perspective of social justice. The chapter will then go on to analyse how international and EU policies have dealt with and regulate the migratory flows associated with forced migration, and to ascertain whether and to what extent such policies are effectively able to regulate such a complex phenomenon.

Tackling and seeking appropriate solutions to the impact of migration induced by climate change and/or conflict upon development and, correspondingly, upon the creation of new inequalities, means thinking globally in order to act locally. The interdependence between global and local events, and vice versa, is not a new phenomenon. Since the 1960s, scholars have referred to «the butterfly effect», to describe the complex interdependence and absorptivity of state and sub-state borders as regards the effects of events occurring in other, more geographically remote parts of the world [Longo et al. 2009]. Today these relationships have become apparent to everyone, as shown by the recent events related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The mix of global and local, «glocal», is now also a mix of different decision-making actions, taken at different levels, which make it difficult to identify who is responsible for decisions, resulting in a complex multilevel process made by countless policies.

In this context, in Italy, and in the European Union in general, the concept of public order and security has been incorporated into the discourse on human mobility. Before the humanitarian crisis ¶{p. 269}caused by the war in Ukraine, migrants were usually perceived according to a Eurocentric stereotypical lens and/or a flawed representation of them [Flahaux and de Haas 2016; Hinojo n.a]. A simple quest for the word migration on the main web search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, leads to web sites, news or academic articles referring to international migration and/or movements from poor and/or war-torn areas to Western countries, mainly in Europe. The images of Africans climbing onto anti-immigration fences built on the Moroccan-Spanish borders, or those of the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean Sea on overcrowded boats, while trying to reach Europe’s promised land, are some of the examples that capture the attention of the media [Euronews 2014; Baratta 2016]. Based on this narrative of migration, particularly in the last two decades, human mobility has been analysed in order to find solutions to the supposed threats that such migratory movements could cause in opulent Western Europe [Flahaux and de Haas 2016; Caruso and Venditto 2013].

On the other hand, mobility, beyond its multiple motivations, whether economic, environmental or conflict-induced, has often been viewed mainly from an international and intercontinental perspective rather than an internal and interregional one. Internal migration has not received the same level of attention, often being analysed primarily as a domestic affair of developing nations associated to events of crisis, such as war or famine. Concurrently, and instrumental to the above positions, the discourse on human mobility has shifted to how migrating individuals might be classified. Commonly used terms include economic migrants (contract/migrant workers, labour migrants, skilled professionals), refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and, more recently, environmental or climate-induced migrants [Wacker, Becker and Crepaz 2019; Fasani 2016; Laczko and Aghazarm 2009]. Such categories are used to assist host governments in regulating and controlling human mobility and selecting who should be entitled to protection and assistance. In our view these categories create a false separation among migrants which does little to explain, understand or address the migration phenomenon. Our perspective, in line with a growing literature [Betts 2010; Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Foster 2007; Elliott 2018; Pijnenburg and Rijken 2021], goes beyond such categories and looks at migration holistically as a fundamental human rights issue.¶{p. 270}

Migration has undoubtedly increased in intensity in recent decades [UNDESA 2020]: looking at international migration for which data are easily available, in 2020 there were more than 280 million international migrants. However, when global population growth is factored in, the number appears less daunting, given that, from 1970 to 2020, the proportion of migrants in the world’s population increased by only 1.3 percentage points, from 2.3 to 3.6 per cent [UNDESA 2021; McAuliffe and Triandafyllidou 2021].

On the other hand, determining the size of internal migration is no easy task because of the non-availability of reliable data. Bell and Muhidin [2009] were the first in the last two decades to comprehensively analyse internal migration flows. They were able to provide a rough approximation of the global scale of internal migration, suggesting that, «at the turn of the millennium, in the world as a whole, some 740 million people were living within their home country but outside their region of birth» [Bell and Muhidin 2009, 55]. Bell and Charles-Edwards [2013], using a much broader sample of 70 countries extracted from the data set on the project Comparing Internal Migration Around the Globe (IMAGE) [1] , revised the previous figure upwards, raising to 763 million the number of people living in their home country but outside their region/area of birth [2] . This figure should include IDPs whose number increased more than tenfold between 1993 and 2019 [IDCM 2021].

Thus, if we look at the number of migrants worldwide, there is no doubt that those who moved while remaining within the borders of their country, are part of what has been an even more massive global migration phenomenon. Furthermore, internal mobility, including IDPs, is quite significant for the purposes of our analysis since the definition of IDPs includes those movements caused by natural or human-induced environmental/climate change and most of the time such movements occur inside the country affected by the change in question.¶{p. 271}

Most environmental migrants come within the IDP category which encompasses those who:

Moreover, there is a clear convergence and overlap between conflicts and disaster areas even if, as exposed by McAuliffe and Triandafyllidou [2021], in recent years many more people have been displaced due to disasters than conflict and violence, and many more countries are affected by disaster displacement [3] .