Climate change is forcing people to flee: How the weather is shaping our future!

Climate change is forcing people to flee: How the weather is shaping our future!

On May 20, 2025, the University of Mannheim announced that political scientist Melanie Sauter would receive important funding from the Margarete von Wrangell Junior Professor Program. Sauter's research field spans humanitarian aid, international peace missions and political violence, with her current focus on the connection between climate, conflict and peacebuilding. An example of her work is the study of the deployment of rescue workers during the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2018 and 2020, which is intended to provide exciting insights into the dynamics of crises and humanitarian intervention.

As part of the program, Sauter has the opportunity to meet Dr. To employ Kristina Petrova in a full-time position for three years. Petrova pursues ambitious goals: her further qualification aims at a junior or tenure-track professorship or leading a junior research group. Together, Sauter and Petrova plan to strategically expand their research on climate-related migration, particularly in conflict regions. This is intended to develop new approaches for resilience strategies and humanitarian aid in fragile states in order to better respond to the challenges of climate change and its influence on migration. The program was recently realigned by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Art.

Climate-related migration as a field of research

Research on climate-related migration has become increasingly important in recent years. The “Global Pact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration”, adopted in December 2018, addresses aspects such as natural disasters and environmental destruction as causes of human mobility. The complexity of the matter is made clear by a variety of terms and definitions: whether “environmental migrant”, “climate migrants” or “environmental refugees” – uniform terms have not yet been established. Alarmists warn of impending humanitarian disasters, while skeptics point out that environmental factors often have an indirect effect and are not the sole causes of migration.

Estimates of how many people are migrating due to climate and environmental changes vary widely. According to Jodi Jacobson, there were already around 10 million environmental refugees in 1988, while Norman Myers estimated there were 25 million in 1995. In later analysis, Myers predicted that approximately 150 million environmental refugees would be expected by 2050, a figure that was revised to 200 million. However, these estimates are affected by unclear definitions, a lack of data and the multi-causal nature of migration decisions, calling their accuracy into question.

Problems of data collection and analysis

The challenge of collecting accurate data is enormous. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) has been maintaining comprehensive data on disaster-related displacement since 2008 and recorded more than 246.5 million people displaced by geophysical and climate-related disasters from 2008 to 2017. Innovative approaches to research, such as multi-agent simulation models and multilevel longitudinal analyses, are emerging to determine long-term trends in migration. However, it remains to be noted that the definition of climate migration is still fraught with definitional and empirical uncertainties.

Research efforts on this topic have increased significantly, going from an average of 10 publications per year in the 1990s to around 100 since 2008. A significant step forward was the commissioning of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2007 to focus intensively on environmental migration. Since 2015, the IOM has set up a dedicated unit for this issue. Despite these advances, research on climate-related migration remains complex and multifaceted.