Historical Grounding of Migration Decisions of the People at Environmental Risks

ended

The HoMe (Historical Grounding of Migration Decisions of People at Environmental Risks) project will provide insights on historical reasons of migration decisions (to migrate or to not migrate) of people at environmental risks. Current research on environmental migration claims that mostly the poor are migrating due to disaster. However, motivations of environmental non-migration go beyond resources constraints and are understudied and not yet understood as migration decisions. The factors contributing to non-migration are supposed to be not simply the inverse of those that motivate to migrate. Rather it is assumed, non-migration is also influenced by the settlement history of a community. Going beyond the state-of-the-art, this project will develop for the first time an analytical framework using Ostrom’s socio-ecological system framework for examining the historical grounding of migration decisions. Second, it will model how changes of the social, political and environmental conditions over time influence migration decisions using agent-based modelling. Third, the model will be used to explore possible future migration decisions based on alternative scenarios of changing societal and environmental conditions in the future making use of the findings from the influence of the historical grounding. This novel and timely study will significantly advance scientific knowledge on environmental migration and the respective modelling capabilities, particularly in the emerging field of 'Environmental Non-Migration'. Results will provide a major contribution to global adaptation policy frameworks, including the SDGs and the EU’s Agenda on Migration. The realisation of this cutting-edge project will substantially support the applicant to achieve higher level of professional maturity. It will be hosted by two excellent, highly experienced and internationally renowned institutes: University of Colorado Boulder (outbound) and Technische Universität Dresden (inbound).