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Transdisciplinary Research and Collaborations

In this session, the speakers considered how transdisciplinary research is important to understand climate change impacts on migration from an Earth systems science approach and associated challenges in conducting said research.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

Diana Liverman (University of Arizona) offered a perspective on the nature, purpose, and practice of transdisciplinary research. Pointing to her own history of having migrated multiple times in response to job opportunities, family priorities, and the quest for adventure—but not for purposes of escaping climate change impacts—she cautioned against the temptation to attribute migration decisions to climate when many other factors are often at play, especially among people who have the resources to move out of choice rather than necessity.

Liverman sees transdisciplinary research as a collaboration that involves nonacademic partners who are co-producing knowledge with a commitment to action. She added that research on climate migration connects many disciplines and scientific methodologies, such as geographers, who are trained in both Earth science and social science, and utilizes various quantitative and qualitative methods and approaches ranging from modeling to ethnography. She noted that current work in climate and migration builds upon a long history of research in fields such as geography and anthropology. For example, she discussed how work in cultural ecology showed how people were able to creatively adapt to climate variability

through social organization and technology. Geographers are using political ecology, which considers human agency, the physical environment, and political economy to understand climate–society relationships, and provide nuanced analysis of whether and why people move or stay. A long tradition of studying climatic and weather hazards can help to explore the linkages between climate and migration, particularly in understanding vulnerability to climate change, Liverman said.

“Sometimes it feels like this climate migration issue is very recent … and it really is not,” said Liverman. Research has shown many links between climate and mobility, including seasonal migrations, as a normal practice and not in response to crisis as well as adaptation to varying climates for decades. She suggested a need for on-the-ground investigations and rigorous experimental designs to better understand the complexity of climate and migration. Liverman stated that studies that rely only on statistical correlation do not provide a complete explanation because correlation is not causation and detailed research is needed to understand the explanation of statistical relationships, including the exploration of outliers and anomalies and confirmation through fieldwork.

From her work studying climate vulnerability and migration in Mexico, Liverman said she learned the importance of using multiple data sources, including local knowledge, to understand climate trends and impacts. She emphasized the value of considering both environmental and social history in community studies and the importance of engaging with communities before designing surveys on climate change by utilizing techniques such as the repertory grid—which asks respondents to compare elements of a landscape or community so that they construct what is important rather than use categories imposed by the interviewer. Another approach is to triangulate information by asking people about their neighbors’ perceptions and decisions as well as their own.

Finally, Liverman added that truly transdisciplinary research requires careful thought about how researchers can give back to the community to avoid simply extracting information without providing any benefit to the people involved. For example, her colleagues have given materials to schools, paid locals to help with research tasks, and included local colleagues and nonacademic collaborators as authors on published articles.

CONNECTING THE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPES

Katharine Donato (Georgetown University) described a collaboration in Bangladesh as an example of transdisciplinary research that connects physical and social landscapes to examine how climate and environmental change affect patterns and processes of demographic outcomes, including migration. Prior to her involvement, she noted that a team of geologists,

engineers, and Earth scientists had been looking at the physical landscape changes there for about 15 years, and she joined the team to provide the perspective of a social scientist. She also cited the National Science Foundation (NSF) Dynamics of Coupled Natural–Human Systems, now called the Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems,¹ program that supports interdisciplinary research to explore interactions of human and natural systems processes at diverse scales.

The study in Bangladesh focuses on water-related challenges and migration in the southwestern part of the country. River channel processes are undergoing significant shifts, and more change is projected in the coming decades, resulting in land loss and deposition on agricultural land, stress on flood embankments, more flooding, and increasing salinity, said Donato. She noted that migration has long been a common form of adaptation in this part of the world, as people are pushed away by various environmental stressors and pulled by various economic opportunities. Migration can be a sign of system failure, when people leave out of a sense of desperation to protect their families, but it can also result in remittances that ultimately strengthen families in communities. To study these dynamics, researchers collected migration histories that capture first and most recent migrant trips, including circular and return migration. Such data collected at detailed spatial and temporal scales permit integration with climate and physical science data and offer information about households that moved or stayed.

The first Bangladesh Environment and Migration Survey (BEMS or BEMS-1) was launched in 2013 and the follow-on BEMS-2 was done in 2019, yielding information on 4,000 households at 20 different sites reflecting a range of socioeconomic and environmental conditions (Carrico and Donato 2023). To track migration patterns, researchers used mixed methods by combining household surveys and remote sensing data to assess the relationship between land erosion and domestic or international migrant trips (Carrico and Donato 2019).

The researchers recently received additional NSF funding to conduct a longitudinal follow-up with about 1,500 households. For the next phase of the study, they plan to focus on the ways in which migration impacts the origin communities in terms of large-scale return migration and its impact on land use and well-being.

During the discussion, a workshop participant suggested some thought be given to the term “vulnerability,” which is often taken to imply inherent characteristics of individuals. They proposed a shift toward viewing vulnerabilities as products of societal structures and inequalities. As an example,

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¹ See https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/dynamics-integrated-socio-environmental-systems/nsf07-598/solicitation (accessed June 24, 2024).

the participant suggested that the link between heat events and early marriage that Donato noted could be attributed to the social system where girls are seen as economic burdens.

A PATH FORWARD FOR TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

Pierre Gentine (Columbia University) spoke of the value of a transdisciplinary Earth systems approach to examine the interdependencies between migration and climate. He described how increasing pressures from extreme events, including flooding, heat stress, wildfires, droughts, and sea-level rise, are impacting livability, food productivity, and migration (Donat et al. 2016; IPCC 2023b; Vanos et al. 2023). He laid out a few factors for consideration in thinking about climate adaptation—accurate-prediction climate models, providing accessible data at scale, and capacity to adapt. Transdisciplinary collaboration is important to further understanding of these processes.

For example, Gentine noted that precipitation changes are not just occurring in the wettest regions of the world, but across the entire globe, adding that even if the annual mean precipitation changes only a little, the extremes of rainfall are also changing, leading to flooding events even in dry regions of the globe (Donat et al. 2016). Heat stress—which reflects a combination of temperature and humidity—is another factor that can contribute to large-scale migration and population movement. Models show that the number of days per year with dangerous heat is increasing, particularly in tropical regions with high population growth, potentially setting the stage for future large-scale across-country migrations (Sherwood and Huber 2010; Vanos et al. 2023; Vargas Zeppetello et al. 2022). Gentine emphasized that this is a complex issue and there are a lot of uncertainties, in terms of both climate modeling and accounting for other factors such as physiological acclimation to heat stress of certain populations. Transdisciplinary research is needed to truly understand the impacts of heat and heat stress, he said.

Droughts are also important because they impact food production, but Gentine said that in many regions, projections based on historical data provide a very uncertain view of the future of droughts. This can be a major issue because it affects planning for adaptations such as reservoirs or dams. Areas where there is more certainty as to the increasing intensity and frequency of droughts include Central America, western North America, and the Mediterranean, areas where Gentine noted that a lot of high-value crops are grown, which suggests that there could be substantial impacts on food productivity and food prices. Transdisciplinary research can provide a holistic view to understand the interplay of the impacts of droughts, food productivity, and migration.

Climate models have been extremely valuable tools, Gentine said, but still too uncertain to address many of the important questions around migration and climate change. Projections of even just global surface temperatures, which is one of the simplest climate metrics, show high levels of uncertainty because the physical system is so complex, and the uncertainties pose an even greater challenge when looking at finer scales. “When we think about adaptation [and] migration, it is not really a global metric that we want to consider,” Gentine said. “The impact is at the very regional scale; we need to think of the regional level.” At this level, climate models are even more uncertain, especially for extremes (Collins et al. 2011; Friedlingstein et al. 2014). Thus, he said, more work is needed to pinpoint climate events at a subcontinent or even more local level to understand the impacts that drive migration. In addition, Gentine underscored the need for more data from underserved communities, especially in regions such as the tropics, to understand and mitigate the impacts of climate change, and he emphasized that transdisciplinary research spanning disciplines from climate modeling to health, biology, sociology, and economics will be particularly valuable in this effort. Gentine noted that through funding by the NSF Science and Technology Center LEAP: Learning the Earth with Artificial intelligence and Physics,² he and colleagues are working to develop a platform that would provide a wide range of stakeholders with access to climate data in the cloud. He also noted that many factors affect the capacity to adapt.

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² See https://new.nsf.gov/od/oia/ia/stc#active-centers-c98 (accessed June 24, 2024).

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