Climate Migration Research and Policy Connections: Progress Since the Foresight Report

About this Research Topic

Background

The Foresight report on Migration and Global Environmental Change (2011) was a first major effort to build the evidence base on environment and migration linkages and explore the policy options for addressing migration drivers and both mobile and immobile populations. Today, the CLIMIG database now catalogs close to 700 empirical studies on climate mobility, and there were close to 1,800 references to migration in the IPCC WG2 report. This collective evidence base has tremendous potential to contribute to policy and praxis on climate mobility.

Ten years after Foresight, this Research Topic seeks to revisit the report and its recommendations, and to build on new evidence from the collective efforts of the climate mobility research community. The Research Topic welcomes new empirical work, especially studies that can inform better policy, as well as reviews of the evidence and retrospective pieces that examine recent work in light of the Foresight report's groundbreaking findings.

The goal of this Research Topic is to extend the body of environmental and climate migration research that began with the Foresight Report on Migration and Global Environmental Change, with a particular emphasis on policy-relevant research findings and studies that examine best policy approaches to addressing climate mobility. There has been substantial policy progress since Foresight, including the Global Compact on Migration, Global Compact on Refugees, various UNFCCC resolutions, the Platform for Disaster Displacement, and regional policy practice. This will be an opportunity to examine how data and evidence can contribute to policy, as well as the policy and programmatic approaches countries are taking in the past 10 years (e.g., temporary protected status, visa programs, facilitated migration, planned relocation, urban insertion programs, etc.) and the gaps and ways forward for research. Papers are encouraged to engage with the research foci around climate mobility espoused by the IPCC sixth assessment report.

This article collection will define the state-of-the-art and will determine the progress that needs to be made in the next decade. We welcome new empirical research (field research findings or analysis of secondary data), review articles or perspectives that make specific reference to Foresight's groundbreaking work (including on the interplay of environmental and other drivers, trapped populations, migration as adaptation, and migrants moving into areas of high risk), policy studies, and policy-oriented perspectives.

Keywords: climate mobilty, climate change, mobility, human mobility, displacement, challenges, future research, Migration, CLIMIG

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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