The interplay of environmental and social drivers of migration - A global synthesis

Over the recent years, human migration has risen to the top of the global agenda. Conflicts in the Middle East, Central America, Southeast Asia, and more recently in Europe have forced millions of people to flee. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people are moving from rural to urban areas as urbanization accelerates, especially in Africa and Southeast Asia. While conflict is perhaps the most tragic driver of human mobility, migration is also driven by multiple socio-economic and environmental factors. In fact, it is the interplay of socio-economic and environmental factors that is behind not only the decision to move but also behind outcomes of migration at the destination. While there is conceptual clarity of the different drivers and outcomes of migration and their interplay, their geospatial and global representations are few. Thus, in this dissertation I address this gap by investigating 1) how human migration has developed in recent decades in different geospatial units; 2) what the key drivers of human migration are, and how these drivers have interplayed over time; and 3) what the implications of human migration are at both sending and receiving areas. In the analysis, I combine a qualitative conceptualization with quantitative analysis, the latter being carried out at a global level by utilizing spatially explicit, novel data that describe human migration and its social-environmental drivers from the past three decades. Quantitative analyses make use of spatial, exploratory and statistical methods, which allows a more comprehensive study of migration in different administrative units, rural and urban areas, and socio-environmental zonings. The global analysis in my dissertation shows that the patterns of migration vary remarkably depending on the geospatial unit and scale used for the analysis; over the past two decades, migration between communes and provinces has been rising, while international migration has remained steady. Urban areas dominate as migration destinations at the global level, while the pattern becomes patchier at regional, national and sub-national levels, where rural areas have also experienced notable in-migration. Over the past three decades, the majority of migration has taken place in areas with medium-level human development and environmental stress, while socio- economic drivers – especially income and education – dominate environmental drivers globally. Finally, I demonstrate that factors of adaptive capacity are instrumental in shaping the outcomes of migration, especially in urban areas that have experienced accelerated population growth caused by in-migration. In the coming decades, migration will continue to function as one of the methods of adaptation. Understanding these complexities and causalities behind human migration and its environmental and social dimensions is key in managing migration, especially in a future facing unprecedented and unforeseen changes.