Project overview:

The increasing frequency and severity of sudden and slow-onset climate-related hazards are bearing visible effects on natural and human systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The consequences of these hazards threaten to derail national and global efforts to achieve sustainable development goals in LMICs. A consensus among scholars holds that climate hazards are crucially linked to migration. From a scientific research perspective, the research portfolio on droughts and cyclones fails to match the severity of its impact in Africa. 

Taking Madagascar, a LMIC characterized by dual exposure to sudden and slow-onset climatic hazards and increasing migration movements, the proposed project, CHAIN, aims to achieve the following intertwined objectives:

Develop a cost-effective procedure to improve our measure of migration in areas with low capacity for data collection and vulnerable to climate change, and over a sufficient spatial and temporal scale required for modeling these processes.

Develop and validate cost-effective procedures to measure multiple hazards (e.g. cyclone incidence, flooding, and droughts) using state-of-the-art numerical modeling, remote sensing techniques and satellite data available to the public.

Contribute a more human-centric approach to quantifying the relationships underlying migration as adaptive responses by exploring the roles of migration duration in a multi-hazard environment, as well as the vulnerability of specific demographic groups.

Investigate anticipated dynamic migration patterns accounting for adaptation and policy responses and their associated feedbacks.

Work packages:

Our proposed methods break into four linked work packages, whose efforts are punctuated by a set of knowledge co-production workshops spaced along the project. The workshops function as interfaces for exchange not only across project partners and participating stakeholders, but also interdisciplinary linkages across work packages.  Specifically, early satellite remote sensing analysis (Work package 1) is a core input to our first workshop and to sampling design.  In turn, workshop findings will inform the direction of physical systems modelling in Work package 2, high-frequency sampling frame (Work package 3), as well as outline needs for a computational framework for migration processes (Work package 4).  All work packages inform our second workshop meeting aimed at outlining key policy paths for consideration, which in turn shapes the space for modelling and analytical work over the coming year, feeding into a final workshop setting to engage and interpret findings.