Preparing Cities for Climate Displacement: Insights from Anticipating Futures in Viet Nam and Pakistan

Extreme weather events and rising sea levels are having an increasing impact on human mobility, especially within specific countries. In 2022, for example, there were 32.6 million disaster-induced displacements around the world, the highest figure seen in a decade, and 70 percent of these took place in Asia Pacific regions. Policy actors need to anticipate and prepare for future human mobility patterns exacerbated by the effects of climate change to ensure that those who move have their human rights protected and can contribute meaningfully to the communities in which they arrive. Knowing how to anticipate, invest and act on these futures now and needing to react to immediate priorities is, however, challenging. This paper outlines the promise of an anticipatory policy design approach that blends predictive analytics with qualitative foresight to provide the data and space that stakeholders need to effectively adapt and anticipate such events. The approach is introduced here as part of an initiative to analyse the scale and effects of migration to Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam and Karachi, Pakistan by 2050 as a result of the effects of climate change.