Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Climate-Induced Migration in Africa and Beyond: Big Data and Predictive Analytics

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will establish transdisciplinary projects to identify and understand how climate-related events, both slow and rapid onset, are linked to human migration and mobility. The project aims to develop a predictive model of climate-induced migration based in theory and informed by spatially explicit data to better understand the climate-migration nexus. Importantly, the project examines how climate migration intersects with other hardships from conflicts to poverty and epidemics. The project will use cell phone data to provide real-time data on migration within a given country, something that is often not captured by global datasets. High resolution mobility patterns will be examined by leveraging satellite, social media, survey, and statistical data. These analyses will inform a framework to estimate the likelihood of displacement within country (using Senegal as a case study) and map locations of “climate shocks.” These mapping exercises will be complemented by social media data and on-the-ground surveys, to understand the public opinion and discourse around climate migration. Building off the case study, the research team plans to build a predictive model using Big Data sources in concert with simulated future scenarios, to help inform public policy. The CLIMB project team is multinational and multi-institutional and includes members who bring expertise from ecology, earth sciences, data sciences, sociology, and economics, representing five countries (Sweden, Turkey, Senegal, Austria, and USA). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.