Climate Hazards and Migration in Madagascar: Towards an Integrated Monitoring and Modeling for Mitigation and Adaptation – CHAIN

The increasing frequency and severity of sudden and slow-onset climate-related hazards are bearing visible effects on natural and human systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The consequences of these hazards threaten to derail national and global efforts to achieve sustainable development goals in LMICs. A consensus among scholars holds that climate hazards are crucially linked to migration. From a scientific research perspective, the research portfolio on droughts and cyclones fails to match the severity of its impact in Africa.

Taking Madagascar, a LMIC characterized by dual exposure to sudden and slow-onset climatic hazards and increasing migration movements, the proposed project, CHAIN, aims to achieve the following intertwined objectives:

- Develop a cost-effective procedure to improve our measure of migration in areas with low capacity for data collection and vulnerable to climate change, and over a sufficient spatial and temporal scale required for modeling these processes.

- Develop and validate cost-effective procedures to measure multiple hazards (e.g. cyclone incidence, flooding, and droughts) using state-of-the-art numerical modeling, remote sensing techniques and satellite data available to the public.

- Contribute a more human-centric approach to quantifying the relationships underlying migration as adaptive responses by exploring the roles of migration duration in a multi-hazard environment, as well as the vulnerability of specific demographic groups.

- Investigate anticipated dynamic migration patterns accounting for adaptation and policy responses and their associated feedbacks.

CHAIN will adopt an integrated multidisciplinary human-centric approach to develop, synthesize, integrate, and supplement data and models to research the complex relationships among the many factors influencing migration/mobility and its relationship to climate hazards, and improve evidence production, public and policy debate, and decision-making.