Researchers from around the world attend climate migration workshop at Princeton
Over the past two decades, policy-makers, practitioners and members of the broader public have increasingly questioned the extent to which climate change influences human migration. Yet, scientific research has so far struggled to provide a clear picture of the impact of climate change on migration, owing in part to limited data and the use of several different modeling approaches, resulting in a fragmented perspective of migration. Modeling intercomparison, which is essentially about applying different models to the same question or case study, offers crucial opportunities to understand this process from different lenses and generate fine-grained policy insights. Yet, despite success stories in other fields, research on environmental migration has not leveraged model intercomparison and/or model integration to address some of the existing questions.
To address this issue, STEP Ph.D. alum Nicolas Choquette-Levy and Columbia University’s Fabien Cottier led a workshop on Climate Migration Modeling Intercomparison at Princeton University from September 25-27. The principal aim for the workshop was to discuss the opportunities and challenges that model intercomparison and integration offer to advance research on environmental migration and generate new policy insights.
“Policymakers and academics widely recognize the importance of modeling the relationship between climate and migration,” explains Tom Bearpark, a co-organizer of the workshop and a STEP Ph.D. student currently working on climate and migration research at Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE). “However, the academic literature remains disjointed, limiting our ability to generate projections that are practical for policy-making. By integrating insights from diverse disciplines and modeling approaches, we aim to enhance existing models and produce more reliable projections to support effective climate mitigation and adaptation planning.”
Tingyin Xiao, another workshop organizer and an associate research scholar at C-PREE, also emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in climate migration research.
"The model intercomparison and integration efforts in climate-related migration research will demand close collaborations among researchers from different backgrounds with diverse perspectives and data sources,” says Xiao. “Building upon this, context-specific studies, that use different methods at varying scales, can help policymakers prioritize the most urgent challenges and develop effective strategies and solutions in response to climate mobility.”
Bringing together more than 30 researchers from three continents and various disciplines, the workshop aimed at generating reflections on how model intercomparison and integration can yield valuable insights for climate migration policy. Specifically, the workshop facilitated discussions about the theoretical perspectives of migration that are embedded in current models, different model approaches to causal inference and migration projection, current intercomparison and model integration efforts, and approaches for model validation.
“The workshops provided us with a fantastic opportunity to discuss the opportunities that model intercomparison and integration offer to resolve the existing shortcomings of quantitative climate migration models, especially as they relate to the integration of theoretical insights in empirical models, the generation of more reliable projections at multiple scales (from households and individuals to aggregate flows), and model performance evaluation.” emphasizes Fabien Cottier, an Associate Research Scientist at the Columbia Climate School.
In addition, the workshop featured a joint session with the Global Center for Climate Mobility titled “Managing Uncertainty in Planning for the Future” as part of its second global Climate Mobility Summit. This session included a keynote speech from C-PREE director Michael Oppenheimer and panel commentary from Fabien Cottier and labor market researcher Michal Burzynski of the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research.
This workshop is only the first step towards initiating a new research agenda centered around model intercomparison. In regard to what’s next, participants at the workshop identified potential case studies, including locations in South Asia and West Africa, where an intercomparison effort could help generate important policy insights on the influence of climate change on migration. Participants also developed ideas for a future collaboration.
“Now that we have a better idea of the research tools each of us uses, and the scales at which we model the climate-migration relationship, we can think more systematically about how to pair insights from different models to provide a fuller picture of this relationship than any one model can provide alone,” says Nicolas Choquette-Levy, a STEP Ph.D. alum currently working as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “There is a lot of enthusiasm to keep building on this momentum, including writing a joint policy-relevant paper in the coming months about this intercomparison effort, and to launch a “hackathon” challenge at a climate migration conference next summer.”
The workshop Climate Migration Modeling Intercomparison was held from September 25-27, 2024 at Princeton University. The workshop was organized by Nicolas Choquette-Levy (Cornell University), Fabien Cottier (Columbia University), Andrew Bell (Cornell University), Michael Oppenheimer (Princeton University), Alex de Sherbinin (Columbia University), Sarah Rosengaertner (Global Center for Climate Mobility), Thomas Bearpark (Princeton University), and Tingyin Xiao (Princeton University). The workshop was made possible by a grant from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Center of Columbia University, the Carolee Bol and Scott Rosenberg ‘95 C-PREE Fund at Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, the Department of Global Development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, the Global Center for Climate Mobility and the Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative.
For more information, interested readers are encouraged to contact Fabien Cottier ([email protected]) or Nic Choquette-Levy ([email protected]).