CLIMIG - A New Interdisciplinary Framework for Studying the Relation between Climate Change and Migration
Short description
The research program CLIMIG sets out to establish a groundbreaking interdisciplinary research environment, uniting natural and social sciences to explore how climate change affects patterns of mobility in three of the world’s most densely populated mountainous regions: the Ethiopian Highlands, the Peruvian Andes, and the Nepalese Himalayas. To disentangle the complex interplay of factors affecting the climate-mobility nexus, this program integrates both qualitative and quantitative methods ranging from ethnographic fieldwork to nonlinear climate modelling, with the aim of developing an innovative analytical framework to advance the understanding of one of the most pressing global challenges of our time.
The Team
Research at the School of Global Studies
Background
Climate related mobility has emerged as a politically contested issue that has raised concerns ranging from resource sharing and the capacity of receiving societies to the heightened vulnerabilities faced by migrants. This research program examines how climate change interacts with other social, cultural, economic, political and ecological drivers of mobility, their interactions, and variations across regions and scales of governance in diverse continents. By mapping the key drivers of mobility and uncovering underlying patterns and regularities, the program aims to develop our understanding of the complex dynamics at play, and establish an interdisciplinary framework for the study of climate related mobility. The program focuses on mountain regions as they are among the most vulnerable habitats to climate change, and showcases how accelerated environmental shifts trigger natural disasters, exacerbate social tensions, and threaten livelihoods - driving local populations to move.
Although climate driven mobility has garnered significant attention from scholars worldwide, few efforts have embraced a truly interdisciplinary approach. CLIMIG bridges this gap by uniting experts from diverse fields, including climatology, human geography, human ecology, international relations, and social anthropology, to re-conceptualize the dynamics of climate mobility. The program is hosted by the School of Global Studies (SGS) at the University of Gothenburg, in affiliation with the Department of Earth Sciences and the Centre on Global Migration (CGM). It is conducted in collaboration with the University of Oslo, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), the Organization of Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA) in Ethiopia, and the South Asia Institute of Advanced Studies (SAIAS) in Nepal. Together, these institutions foster an interdisciplinary and innovative research environment that actively engages both junior and senior scholars from the Global South and North.
To ensure its relevance for a global audience of stakeholders, the research program creatively integrates quantitative data on both climate and migration with qualitative insights that capture the lived realities of peoples on the move, as well as those staying put, amid environmental upheaval. This approach not only meets the basic scientific needs of policymakers, but also integrates local knowledge and emotive storytelling to make complex academic concepts accessible for wider audiences.
Research Aims
- To account for climate change as both a context for and a driver of mobility within cutting edge theories of migration and mobility;
- To rethink the relation between different drivers of climate mobility to better account for empirically observed human mobility patterns;
- To integrate complex biophysical and social political data in innovative ways by designing an analytical framework that tests particular constellations of drivers, including quantification of their relative importance.
Research Questions and Methods
- What forms of mobility exist in rural Ethiopia, Peru and Nepal and how have these changed during the last 30 years?
- How does climate change affect mobility dynamics, especially people’s propensity to move?
- How does climate change intersect with other mobility drivers?
- How can in-depth local level social and political data best inform the development of fine-grained regional climate models?
To address these questions, the program employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including surveys, interviews, network mapping, non-linear climate modelling, as well as participant observation. The interdisciplinary and internationally collaborative characteristics of the program provides diverse expertise and complementary methodological approaches to the study of climate mobility.
