Transformations in Risk

Project Overview

This SIDA funded project addresses the theme of climate and migration and is concerned with the interaction of multiple stressors and understanding how processes scale up to take on regional and global significance, resulting in humanitarian crises and permanent migration.

Current and Historical Risk

The Global Footprint project is the doctoral work of Lezlie Moriniere based on a collaboration between SEI and the University of Arizona.

The Global Footprint will compile the best-available evidence through space (gridded, national or regional) and time (longitudinal, up to hundreds of years). All available global datasets will be tapped to explore triggers of human mobility and the footprint of these population movements. The Global Footprint will help visualize environmentally-induced migration and it will subsequently guide a GIS-based micro-simulation exercise that systematically explores the weight of various drivers acting on independent agents within dynamic contexts of policy, perception and capacity. The Global Footprint will reveal important patterns that can be used to identify potential migration ‘hotspots’ thereby facilitating risk management.

Actor-system pathways

• Our scientific methodology focuses on the use of Agent-based modelling. A few examples follow:

The Sugarscape model of environmentally induced migration is available online, hosted at the Modelling4All webapp and linked through TiR project wiki. This was developed by Ken Kahn at University of Oxford Computer Science.

Please see here for a description of the model, tutorials and other learning resources. The model features in the book ‘Growing Artificial Societies’ by Epstein and Axtel.

Further Reading

• Earthzine article on the Global Footprint