Addressing the Impact of Climate Change on Human Mobility in Egypt

Climate change presents a new sort of challenge. It has an uncertain future, different forms and extent. It is also characterised by being long-lasting rather than an instant in both its impacts and its remedies. Climate change is generally defined as a long-term shift in temperatures and weather patterns. It poses a grave threat to the world, especially to the poorest countries. The effects of climate change in Egypt can be broadly grouped under three headings: ecological, social, and economic. This review aims to collect and summarise all the knowledge produced related to climate change and human mobility in Egypt. The method deployed in this report to review the literature on migration in Egypt and climate change is a three-step approach. The first step consists of reviewing, analysing, and summarising the theoretical literature on the impact of climate change on human mobility to provide a general understanding of this nexus. The second step consists of reviewing reports and related news on climate change and climate migration in Egypt at the time of this report. The third step complements the first and the second step by reviewing relevant studies to the report using a fixed query as defined in the following paragraph. By using the Google™ search engine to search for reports and news on “climate change”, “climate migration”, and “environmental migration” in “Egypt,” by considering the most relevant reports and news, the outcome is a fairly up-to-date starting point - ranging from the years of publication between 2010 and 2022. These reports were then studied one by one, and the reference lists of all of them were screened for further in-depth analysis of relevant articles on the concept of climate migration in Egypt. The assessment done in the first and second steps was accompanied by more studies on climate change and migration in Egypt. This was done by searching on Scopus, Google Scholar, Jstore, ProQuest, and EBSCO, by using the following combination of keywords and subject headings to guide the search: (1) “climate change,” (2) “migration,” “internally displaced persons,” “refugee,” (3) “Egypt”. This report considers the relevant studies from today backwards. By relevant, we mean that the articles should address the link between climate change and human mobility in Egypt. As a limitation, there are not enough investigations on empirical studies due to the unavailability of the data.