Arbeitsbereich

Bevölkerungsdynamik und Nachhaltiges Wohlbefinden

Auf einen Blick Projekte Publikationen Team

Projekt

Climate Change and Human (Im)Mobility: The Role of Compound and Cascading Risks (Dissertation)

Sarah Kilpatrick, Roman Hoffmann (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Österreich), Emilio Zagheni, Asli Ebru Sanlitürk; in Zusammenarbeit mit Jonas Peisker (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Österreich)

Ausführliche Beschreibung

A broad aim of this dissertation project is to better understand how climate change affects human (im)mobility on the macro and micro scales. Building on the aspirations-capabilities framework (De Haas, 2021), we address the following questions: If we maintain that migration is an intrinsic process, how does an environment that is changing more rapidly than ever before impact this process? Who is most vulnerable to mobility constraints, and why? Who gets to stay, and who cannot leave?

This dissertation project aims to achieve three primary goals. These goals, outlined below, serve as a basis for individual studies that will form the chapters of this dissertation:

(i) Map a global picture of concomitant climate hazards in order to see where rising greenhouse gas emission-related risks interact, combine, or influence one another. These risks include anomalous temperatures, unseasonal precipitation or drought, or acute events such as wildfires and floods.

(ii) Apply this mapping to survey data on aspirations to migrate, or to observed international migration data, to answer questions related to the aspirations-capabilities framework.

(iii) Incorporate digital trace data such as social media data products or website traffic to forecast very short-term migration trends, also known as nowcasting.

While developing these studies, this dissertation project asks how demography can expand or modify the aspirations-capabilities framework by incorporating climate hazards, exposure, and vulnerability into predictive demographic models. Moreover, by explicitly including people who stay, whether by choice or not, this project will support a widening of the demographic vocabulary for studying climate-influenced migration and affirming the validity of immobility as its own standalone topic of inquiry in migration research.

This dissertation project focuses on regions where populations encounter varying levels of vulnerability and exposure to climate hazards. The focus is primarily on population centers in the Global South where data are available; for example, the scope will include countries that participate in DHS surveys, or countries where digital trace data can be used to augment traditional migration data. Populations exposed to climate hazards will have varying degrees of vulnerability to climate hazards. This dissertation will look closely at how these variations in vulnerability are interconnected with immobility.

The chosen datasets include open-source, worldwide climate and meteorological data provided by state-of-the-art climate models. Current research in the field utilizes a wide range of data, including climate data from the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT), mobility data from census and survey data provided by IPUMS International, and web-scraped public data, also known as digital trace data.

This dissertation uses a combination of quantitative methods. The seasonal and intercorrelated nature of climate data gives this project the opportunity to use models that can handle these influences. Random effects models, derived from econometrics, can determine the impact of climate hazards. Ridge regression can also handle collinearity in predictor variables.