Climate-Induced Migration in Africa and Beyond:

Climate change may cause people to move within their own country or to move to other countries, driven also in part by conflicts, poverty, and diseases or other threats to peoples health. However, there is still a lot of debate about the exact interconnection between climate change and migration. Climate risks are more likely to affect mobility within countries than cross-border migration. As a result, macro analyses of cross-country migration flows tend to find small and very uncertain climate impact on human mobility. Therefore, we will look at actual migration at a high spatial and temporal resolution, using a variety of datasets. We will use Senegal as example, for two reasons: First, the country is projected to experience more extreme weather events, which could force up to one million people to move by 2050. It also suffers from poverty, inequality, conflict, and epidemics. Second, call data records (CDR) data provided through a partnership with Sonatel (the principal telecommunications provider of Senegal) offer a unique opportunity to study mobility patterns at a high resolution. In addition to using CDR, CLIMB will also make use of Earth observation (EO) and social media data and combine them with survey and official statistical data. This holistic approach will allow us to analyze migration processes from a multi-stage perspective (e.g. from initial displacement to onward/return migration), hence gain more insights about the temporality of climate-induced migration. It will also allow us to better understand how migratory processes are shaped by multi-level (macro, meso, and micro) factors: climate risks, socio-economic crises, public opinion, social networks, and human perceptions, aspirations, and capabilities, among others. This holistic approach requires multidisciplinary expertise. The CLIMB consortium therefore consists of researchers from data science, statistics, geography, Earth observation, sociology, political science, and demography. Social and economic concepts on migration in Senegal will be reviewed principally by the Agricultural and Rural Prospective Initiative (IPAR), a Senegalese strategic research center. The Department of Geoinformatics Z_GIS at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS) will deploy cutting-edge geospatial technologies for disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, humanitarian response, as well as hybrid AI approaches for the exploitation of Big EO data. The Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) of Harvard University will process a dedicated Twitter data collection and Meta (formerly Facebook) data. The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) from Harvard will contribute its state-of-the-art forecasting system for asylum-related migration. CDRs will be analyzed by Data Pop Alliance. The project is led by the Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM) of Malmö University.