Climate-Induced Migration

Platform for the Integration of Migrants

Project Context and Goals

In late 2019, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) began work that seeks to facilitate the collection, analysis, and dissemination of territorial data on migrants, as a way to improve the capacity of subnational entities in the formulation of public policies for their integration and protection.

As part of this regional project, the IDB, through its Housing and Urban Development and Migration Divisions, are launching a data-driven project to understand both the drivers of environmental mobility and its future geographic distribution in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), with a specific focus on mobility decisions at the subnational level. The purpose is to generate, analyze, and present new data in order to better contextualize climate-driven mobility and inform evidence-based policies that broaden the capacity of cities in the region to respond to the challenges of environmental change, particularly climate change, and foster integration for migrant populations in cities and metropolitan areas.

The Zolberg Institute will support this project by:

• Producing a framework to understand the environmental and climate-related drivers behind migration in LAC, and their interaction with other drivers;
• Generating a LAC-specific model to project and map environmental and climate mobility, with a specific focus on the production of data at the city level;
• Based on these modeling and data outputs, developing policy-relevant, operational messages that help cities frame more accurately the effects, challenges, and opportunities of  the climate-migration nexus for cities.

This research was supported by the Inter-American Development Bank.
Research is led by Achilles Kallergis, Assistant Professor and Director Cities and Migration Project.