CLIMIG - A new interdisciplinary framework for studying the relation between climate change and migration
Short description
The research programme 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
About the project
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.
Publications
Project activities
Now in its third year, the research programme has made significant progress, and the team is eager to share the latest developments.
In preparation for fieldwork in each country, the teams conducted comprehensive literature reviews on migration history, location-specific drivers of migration, and climate data for each selected field site. Subsequently, the survey data collection was successfully completed in Ethiopia, Nepal, and Peru. In total, the sample included 835 respondents with a 45.5 % and 54.5% female-to-male respondent ratio. This data will lay the ground for the programme’s continued progress under the years to come.
In November 2024, a two-day workshop brought together the research team from all participating countries at the University of Gothenburg, both onsite and online. At the conference, the entire research team, with its diverse expertise and disciplines, had the opportunity to meet, discuss updates, share insights, and brainstorm new ideas.
Currently, programme team members, in various constellations, are working on research articles of both a conceptual and empirical nature. Worth mentioning is a review article written collectively by several members, taking stock of previous conceptual frameworks for studying climate (im-)mobility and designing a new framework and research agenda. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 22nd Nordic Migration Research Conference at the University of Bergen in August, 2024.
