Emerging research methods in environmental displacement and forced migration research

Abstract

Environmental displacement can be defined as forced migration occurring entirely or partly from local environmental restructuring. This includes displacement from sudden environmental events, such as storms, earthquakes, and tsunamis, or from long term changes related to the impacts of climate change, development, conservation‐related residential displacement, and environmental gentrification. Over the past decade, investigating the human impacts of displacement has become an emerging focus within displacement research. The idea of displacement is not only difficult to define but challenging to measure, due in part to a multitude of influences environmental factors have on the ability to stay put. Displacement throughout history has occurred from many factors, including social, political, environmental, and economic. Environmentally related displacement is arguably the most unpredictable form of displacement and is increasingly a problem for both the Global North and the Global South. Geographers have not always focused on these issues, although researchers are increasingly exploring this inherently spatial and temporal problem. A more thorough understanding of environmental displacement is possible by exploring available and relevant interdisciplinary research methods and methodologies used for analyses. This review focuses on literature that links both event‐driven and ongoing change‐driven displacement to environmental change to reveal the patterns across several subfields of displacement research and suggest areas for further development.

The Ethics of Naming in Forced Displacement Research: Critical Work and Policy Labels

“…Adopting a similar approach to the conceptual and methodological terms in use is useful, as writings on forced displacement in critical qualitative inquiry methodologies across disciplines—while having much to offer—are similarly diverse. Within the context of forced displacement, critical qualitative inquiry methodologies are continuing to develop and be applied in disciplines such as education (Hauber-Özer & Call-Cummings, 2020; Vellanki, 2019), human geography (Lohvynova, 2019; Miller & Vu, 2021), environmental sustainability (Zickgraf, 2021), sociology (García, 2018), and more (Gemenne, 2018; Hailu et al, 2022; Zapata-Barrero & Yalaz, 2018, 2020). As this occurs, many critical methodological directions are available.…”

Decision‐making factor interactions influencing climate migration: A systems‐based systematic review

“…Previous reviews have offered enumerations of both direct and indirect factors influencing migration (Beine & Jeusette, 2019; Borderon et al, 2019; Priodarshini & Mallick, 2021), with many categorizing these factors into themes similar to Black et al's (2011) conceptual frame (Beine & Jeusette, 2019; Berlemann & Steinhardt, 2017; Kaczan & Orgill‐Meyer, 2020; Šedová et al, 2021; Veronis et al, 2018). Some reviews have focused on methodological practices in this field of research (Fussell et al, 2014; Piguet, 2022; Safra de Campos et al, 2016), while others limit to geographic areas (Borderon et al, 2019; Kaczan & Orgill‐Meyer, 2020; Priodarshini & Mallick, 2021), mobility type (Miller & Vu, 2021; Obokata et al, 2014; Veronis et al, 2018), or specific climate hazard (Duijndam et al, 2022).…”

Measuring the effect of climate change on migration flows: Limitations of existing data and analytical frameworks

“…We thus focus on one specific approach and its limitations and leave out qualitative small-N research, which faces different challenges. In contrast to other review studies that systematically focus on the evidence collected so far [5][6][7] or methodological approaches [9,10], we consider a large selection of key studies to discuss various limitations in this field that we believe simplify the picture of how climate change affects migration flows [11,12]. In the following, we first present current approaches to measuring climate change, international and internal migration and their strengths and weaknesses, before discussing ways to overcome the limitations of existing analytical frameworks.…”