Environmental migration, in its different forms, is an aspiration toward stability domains amidst dynamic system change. This paper assesses critical system relationships that couple human and natural systems and change in due course of a regime shift affecting Garífuna villages in Northern Honduras. The specified resilience of these relationships influences the course that migration takes after a flooding event. In impacted villages, migration is a mechanism for demographic fragmentation, 'downgrades' livelihood chains, and reinforces a class divide. Villages systems that experience a shift to uninhabitable and unproductive state spaces become shallow stability domains and consequently, perpetual exporters of migrants over an extended period of time. In the end, migration itself is a cascading aspect of a regime shift that is both ecological and social, forced and chosen. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Environmental migration displacement Flooding Regime shift Social-ecological systems Honduras

Honduras critical analysis flooding fragmentation demography migration