This chapter explains the likely consequences of proposals to resettle large numbers of people away from the Pacific Islands for the people left behind. It does this by describing the effects of large-scale migration away from the small island state of Niue, which is a very good analogue from which lessons for other islands can be drawn.

The chapter begins by examining the discourse on large-scale migration as a solution to save the people of the Pacific Islands from the impacts of climate change. The discourse of draining the people from these remote island backwaters of the world persists even though understanding of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in the Pacific Islands remains extremely limited. In this discourse there is little concern for the needs and rights of migrants, and no consideration of the consequences of such movements for those people who cannot or do not wish to move. It is this latter issue that this chapter examines.

There has been large-scale migration from Niue since 1971, to the extent that 80 per cent of the people born in Niue now live in New Zealand. There are six principal effects of this depopulation on those who remain on the island, namely that it leads to: distortions in markets; obsolescent political and administrative institutions; a hyper-concentration of social capital; increased demands on labour; difficulties in defining and maintaining that which is ‘traditional’; and an erosion of Niuean identity.

Based on this examination, the chapter argues that migration is likely to be an impact of climate change as much as it is to be an adaptation. Mitigation and adaptation must therefore be the preferred strategies, although there may be scope for carefully managed labour migration as part of a suite of adaptation strategies.

The North Atlantic island communities were hit particularly hard when the Little Ice Age encroached upon them in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The islanders had settled during the warm medieval period and had established well-functioning societies. In Iceland this had resulted also in the creation of a remarkable literary canon.

When the climate changed, Icelandic society became unsettled – literally and metaphorically. The original pattern of independent farmsteads, containing both owners and farmhands, broke asunder. With decreasing production, the farms could support fewer people, and an increasing number of people became vagrants in a landscape of scarce opportunities. Within Icelandic society, as established by the settlements and as enforced through consecutive laws, vagrancy was illegal, however. The uprooted were victims of hard times, but they were also increasingly seen as a threat to the social order by the settled members of society. History shows how the vagrants (flakkarar) were gradually dehumanized, sometimes even demonized, as they struggled to find a foothold in a hostile environment.

The general idea of this chapter is to discuss how categorization infiltrates and possibly aggravates the plight of people who are uprooted in the wake of climate change. This also calls for a careful reconsideration of causality in history.

This chapter offers an overview of the history of human migration, conditions pertaining to past migrations, and the types of evidence that allow their study. The importance of scales of time and space is illustrated by ‘standing still’ for a thousand years at a busy crossroads in Europe, and observing the emergence of new social forms. How can these observations help to anticipate and formulate responses to contemporary population movements?

Projections of sea-level rise generally imply that Pacific low-lying reef and atoll islands will be subject to considerable environmental changes, gradually diminishing their habitability. As a result, the option of abandoning the islands either through increased migration and/or relocation has been proposed as a potential adaptation strategy. Drawing on insights from Solomon Islands, this chapter explores how outlying island communities both historically and recently have engaged in human mobilities and partial relocations beyond the islands and in what ways these practices form active and deliberate adaptation strategies. Based on findings, it is argued that moving people into new locations as a response to climate change could have large socio-cultural, economic, and environmental consequences, potentially creating new vulnerabilities for the communities involved. Thus, any required future relocation of communities must be planned carefully, in order to select appropriate destinations for resettlement, and to guarantee long-term ownership or user rights to land and other resources in order to secure people's livelihood opportunities.