Mapping the Future of Migration and Climate Change Science

Abstract

The scholarship on migration and climate change has been rapidly developed over recent decades, moving away from apocalyptic predictions of mass displacement toward more nuanced modeling of the complex relationships between climate change and migration. Unfortunately, much of that development has happened in parallel to the core of migration studies and thus our prevailing migration theories do not reflect these emerging studies of climate and migration. Our objectives for this article are to describe the general theoretical assertions made in the climate change-migration literature and propose a theoretical framework for guiding empirical investigations into the ways that climate change drives human migration, identifying the mediating variables that more directly shape migration and integrating multiple levels of analyses. We provide an example of how our theoretical framework can be used to design an analytic strategy and conclude by suggesting how future research can use this conceptual model to move toward a cohesive theory of climate-related migration and resulting policy responses.