9th Conference on Migration Research in Austria

Climate change negatively impacts livelihoods, security, health, and well-being and can lead to displacement and increased migration from affected areas. At the same time, not everyone exposed to climatic risks becomes mobile, and a significant share of those exposed remains immobile for various reasons. Despite a growing empirical and theoretical literature, substantial knowledge gaps remain—particularly in the geographical context of Europe—regarding the conditions under which climatic factors influence migration, who migrates in response to climatic stress, where people migrate to, and how future climatic and socioeconomic trends may shape migration patterns. The lack of robust and context-specific evidence on the links between climatic factors and migration continues to hinder the development of comprehensive policies and the provision of adequate support for affected populations. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of the academic literature on climate change and migration towards and within Europe, explicitly including other forms of human mobility such as displacement and planned relocation. In a first step, we developed a comprehensive list of keywords related to human mobility, climate change impacts, and Europe (including individual European countries). These keywords formed the basis for a structured literature search conducted in the Web of Science, Scopus, and CLIMIG bibliographic databases, with the latter also covering relevant grey literature such as working papers and reports. The initial search yielded a large number of potentially relevant studies (7,971 from Web of Science, 7,324 from Scopus, and 1,139 from the CLIMIG database). In a first processing step, records from the three databases were merged and duplicates were removed. In a second step, we conducted an initial screening based on titles and keywords in order to exclude studies not relevant to the research questions. This resulted in a selection of 1,420 studies. In a third step, abstracts were screened in more detail, leading to a final set of 362 studies identified as relevant for inclusion in the systematic review. The studies present information on human mobility patterns from 35 countries across Europe and neighbouring regions (Figure 1 and 2 below). The analysis of the study contents is currently ongoing and is expected to be completed before July this year. The systematic literature review is part of the CCMIG-EU Project (“Quantifying Climate Change Impacts on Migration Towards and Within Europe”, Dec 2024-Nov 2027) which aims to (i) analyze and quantify the impacts of gradual climatic changes and extreme weather events on migration towards and within Europe using comprehensive statistical data and advanced analytical methods; (ii) develop a series of future migration projections based on global climate and socioeconomic scenarios; and (iii) explore how policymakers in the EU and Austria understand the links between climate change and migration, and how scientific evidence is integrated into policy-related processes.