Environment, Migration and Earth Observation

Description

With the effects of climate change becoming increasingly evident, the nexus between environmental conditions and migration gains more and more attention of scholars and NGOs active in this field. This calls for an interdisciplinary approach that combines qualitative research on motivations and aspirations towards migration, quantitative sociological studies, and technological facilitation. For the latter, geospatial and Earth observation (EO) based analyses have recently emerged to detect, monitor, and forecast current and future changes of land cover, land use, changing weather patterns and extreme weather events. EO is routinely employed by governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental actors to gain insights in disaster risk reduction, disaster response, environmental monitoring and international cooperation. Satellite images and derived geospatial information products provide a rich and mature data source, which is complementary to traditional methods in social sciences to study migration. However, insights gained from such data sets rely on trustful quality levels of advanced geo-analytical products. While a plethora of geospatial datasets exists on global scale, their inherent quality is neither comparable nor uniform. Satellite imagery with specific sensor characteristics have a well-defined scope of usability, whereby experienced users may operate according to a well-defined quality by design. On the contrary, derived products or other secondary data (whether authoritative or community-generated), often lack conformance with the expected quality requirements. An innovative toolset of geospatial data integration is promoted in our ongoing project CLIMB – Climate Induced Migration, Big Data and Predictive Analytics. Here, we report on our experiences and preliminary results, and provide an overview of the wide range of remote sensing data and their potential in the context of integrated migration research.

Period	5 Jul 2024
Event title	21st IMISCOE Annual Conference: Migration as a Social Construction: A Reflexive Turn
Event type	Conference
Location	Lissabon, PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International