Environmental Change and Global Migration Futures

Download the final workshop programme.

Please note that attendance at the workshop is by invitation only. The Global Migration Futures team plans to hold another event at the beginning of Michaelmas Term 2012 to launch the report based on insights from the workshop, and this event will be open to the wider Oxford community (in particular the Oxford Martin School community).

There is increasing awareness that environmental factors are among many other variables working in concert to shape, prompt or constrain migration flows. It is also becoming clear that environmental factors tend to affect migration more indirectly, and that these impacts depend on their interaction with structural drivers of migration, such as economic and political conditions.

The key challenge addressed by this workshop is how to achieve a better conceptual and methodological integration of the largely separate fields of environmental and migration studies.

The workshop is supported by the Oxford Martin School. The outcomes of this workshop will support the development of the Global Migration Futures project’s scenarios on future international migration for various regions across the globe (Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Pacific).

Aims

• To bring together early/mid-career and senior researchers and policy makers to assess the state of the art of knowledge from research and policy communities on the links between environmental change and migration, and their implications for future migration processes.
• To start bridging the conceptual and methodological gaps between the fields of environmental change and migration.
• To develop useful common concepts, methods, and methodologies to study the reciprocal relationship between environmental change and migration.