Forecasting environmental migration to the United Kingdom: an exploration using Bayesian models

Abstract

Over the next fifty years the potential impact on human livelihoods of environmental change could be considerable. One possible response may be increased levels of human mobility. This paper offers a first quantification of the levels of environmental migration to the United Kingdom that might be expected. The authors apply Bijak and Wiśniowski's (2010) methodology for forecasting migration using Bayesian models. They seek to advance the conceptual understanding of forecasting in three ways. First, the paper is believed to be the first time that the Bayesian modelling approach has been attempted in relation to environmental mobility. Second, the paper examines the plausibility of Bayesian modelling of UK immigration by cross-checking expert responses to a Delphi survey with the expectations about environmental mobility evident in the recent research literature. Third, the values and assumptions of the expert evidence provided in the Delphi survey are interrogated to illustrate the limited set of conditions under which the forecasts of environmental mobility, as set out in this paper, are likely to hold.

Childlessness and fertility by couples' educational gender (in)equality in Austria, Bulgaria, and France

“…In (Raftery et al 2012;Bryant and Graham 2013;Wiśniowski et al 2015) and migration (e.g., Bijak 2011;Abel et al 2013). In fertility studies these , ,...,…”

Forecasting Scottish Migration in the Context of the 2014 Constitutional Change Debate

“…(), as well as recent applications of the Delphi survey for migration modelling and forecasting in Bijak and Wiśniowski (), Abel et al . (), Raymer et al . (), and Wiśniowski et al .…”

“…It was aided by an online Multidisciplinary Assessment of Technology Centre for Healthcare (MATCH) Uncertainty Elicitation Tool (Morris et al, 2014). The questionnaire was designed following the general advice on elicitation given by Kadane and Wolfson (1998), O'Hagan (1998), and O'Hagan et al (2006, as well as recent applications of the Delphi survey for migration modelling and forecasting in Bijak and Wiśniowski (2010), Abel et al (2013), Raymer et al (2013), and Wiśniowski et al (2013).…”

“…The forecasting model has been constructed similarly as in Abel et al (2013), following the methodological work by Bijak (2010) and Bijak and Wiśniowski (2010). First, expert views related to the level of migration in the forecast horizon year H = 2021 have been transformed into the prior distribution in the following ways.…”

“…Migration is the most uncertainand barely predictablecomponent of the population change; hence, forecasting it requires a careful assessment of the uncertainty (e.g. Bijak, 2010;Bijak & Wiśniowski, 2010;Abel et al, 2013). The uncertainty of migration predictions comes from several sources.…”