Frontiers in climate change and migration research

The crisis of climate impacts with increasingly extreme weather trends has undeniably significant consequences for life and livelihood. Two decades of research has shown that climate change affects where people live through affecting the spatial distribution of resources on which people depend and through changing the landscape of risk. Climate change related migration is happening now, even if it is not the principal determinant of current migration flows. This seminar reports on research into migration decision-making, intentions, and consequences in the face of climate hazards. The results show that future climate risks affect migration intentions, and that migrant destinations are themselves exposed to climate risks. Drawing on empirical examples from over six years of research in Bangladesh, the presentation highlights still-to-be-resolved research frontiers including how to make destinations safe and resilient for new populations, and climate-induced planned relocation.


About the speaker:
Dr. Ricardo Safra de Campos is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Exeter working on population movements in the context of climate change, with a research focus on migration, sustainability and wellbeing. His work has been published in interdisciplinary journals including Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, and discipline-specific such as Population, Space and Place. He is a contributing author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. Ricardo gave expert oral evidence on migration and climate change to EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the UK’s House of Lords in 2020. He serves on the advisory board of international research and policy initiatives on climate-related displacement in Africa and Asia; and is on the editorial board for the journals Climatic Change; PLOSClimate; and Climate Mobilities, Frontiers in Climate.