Navigating the Complexity of Environmental Migration In the Context of Climate Change: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Concepts and Methods

Lucie Clech , Kevin Chapuis, Marion Borderon, Coline Garcia, Kees van der Geest, Flore Gubert, Jamal Khan, Bishawjit Mallick, Anne-Sophie Robilliard, Fabien Durand, Sylvie Fanchette

This article, from the perspective of a collective of researchers from the French National Research Institute for Development and collaborators, presents and discusses the conceptual and methodological frameworks they have developed to study environmental migration and (im)mobilities. It is based on a workshop organised within the IRD’s CoSav Migrations network, which brought together researchers seeking to better understand how environmental and climatic changes drive, constrain and interact with human migration and (im)mobilities.
This article emerges at a particular moment: a third generation of researchers now works in this field, sharing a growing recognition that environmental migration and (im)mobilities cannot be reduced to simple causal chains. Understanding migration complexity requires approaches that are conceptually grounded, methodologically diverse, and capable of engaging with uncertainty, multi-causality, and scale interactions.
This work arises from a collaborative, interdisciplinary process that brings together researchers from various backgrounds in social and environmental sciences. This diversity necessitated ongoing dialogue to clarify the underlying epistemologies, temporalities, scales and analytical priorities of concepts still under development. Instead of suggesting a single unified framework, the article describes an evolving field in the making, rooted in empirical realities and shaped by ongoing discussions. In doing so, it emphasises the importance of conceptual reflexivity, methodological diversity, and collaborative knowledge production to address a research object that remains unstable and context-dependent.
The article is organised around four interconnected dimensions of this complexity. Chapter 2 investigates environmental hazards, highlighting their compound, non-linear, and multi-scalar characteristics. Chapter 3 focuses on livelihoods, understood as socially and historically rooted practices that shape migration and staying strategies. Chapter 4 presents habitability as an inclusive concept that reflects the relational and political processes through which environments become differently liveable. Finally, Chapter 5 addresses methodological challenges, presenting complex adaptive systems as a comprehensive framework alongside agent-based modelling and the ongoing limitations of data and scale.
Taken together, these contributions highlight an evolving field characterised by conceptual plurality, methodological diversity and the need for deeper dialogue across disciplines and knowledge systems. It calls for research that is more reflexive, integrative and attentive to power relations, local knowledge and cross-scale dynamics in order to better understand the present and future of migration and (im)mobilities in contexts of environmental change.