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Systems: Climate Migration in India

This research project investigates patterns of climate-induced migration in India. It was an exercise in Systems Thinking, triggered by the lack of conversation around migration as an often overlooked consequence of climate change. This is a brief report highlighting some milestones of the research. My role included conceptual mapping, GIS visualisations, and secondary research.

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Nostradamus (linked here) emerged as a conceptual intervention from this study.

Duration: 8 weeks | Classroom project | Research, Systems Thinking | Collaborators: Neha Agnihotri, Preeti Shibu

Brief on the Project

Internal climate migrants are rapidly becoming the human face of climate change. By 2050—in just three regions—climate change could force more than 143 million people to move within their countries. (Kanta Kumari Rigaud et al., 2018). Our studies indicate that a substantial number of instances of climate change-induced migration are already happening across the Indian subcontinent. Often, these changes in the climate are the direct result of anthropogenic activities. Internal migration in India has been historical, generational, mostly temporary, and partly driven by the aspirations of the migrants (Tumbe, 2018).

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From findings collected through secondary and primary sources, we put together a pseudo-framework that accounts for the climate migration patterns observed in India. Our objective through this study has been primarily to establish the causal relationship between climate change and migration, and to further the discussion surrounding these two domains.

Goals of the study

Data was principally collected through secondary sources, supplemented by interviews with the climate displaced and domain experts. 

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Understanding the System

Being a complex phenomenon with a major human element involved, migration had to be dealt with on a systems level. 

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Our task was to categorise and define migration; identify the key players, stakeholders, the stock, and the external influences that affect the system. 

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An important revelation that emerged to me was that migration by itself is not a system, but a behaviour of the system that governs how suitable a location is for long-term settlement.

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Lee's Laws of Migration gave us an understanding of what contributes to making a place comfortable to live. We recategorised them for our understanding.

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Understanding Livability / Defining Links

Once we realised the system was about what makes particular geography livable, we had to understand what factors influence the "livability" of a place. We based our factors on Lee's Laws of Migration, combined with our secondary research into the domain of migration.

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We applied climate stressors and sought deductions on which of these factors will be impacted 

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And at the destination of the migrants, the livability of the destination itself is impacted by increasing population, cultural differences, and increased stress on the resources.

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As a whole, the system's causal loop was conceptualised as below. The idea wasn't to build it into a predictive model but to only understand the behavior of the system.

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The "Human" Element / Personas

This exercise would've been incomplete if it only looked at macro-level phenomena. To understand the lives of the people involved, we constructed two personas.

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Vegetation Change and climate migration

On a slightly different tangent, we confirmed our intuition that climate migration happening due to droughts was predominantly in regions with substantial loss of vegetation in the past decade. This was done using NDVI data over the subcontinent.

Click and move the mouse to enlarge the map.

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Research Insights

Our research highlighted certain areas that required intervention that were worked upon. 

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Cases: Beed now, and Mumbai in 2040

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If we were to look at Beed case from the lens of the livability framework,  it might look like this

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Click the image for full-res version

For Mumbai in 2042, it might be similar to what we see below

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Click the image for full-res version

At this stage, this framework is far from being actionable, but I believe it provides a novel perspective worthy of further investigation.

Visualising the System

The entire research was condensed to a single Systems Map

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Click on the map for a full-resolution version

Click on the map for a full-resolution version

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And that's us with the map

Identifying Opportunities

A conceptual urban planning tool, called Nostradamus (linked here), was envisioned to help build cities that are more resilient to environmental impacts and migration. Photographed below are scribbles of some other ideas that came about from this exercise.

Assumptions, Limitations and Biases

This was a short-duration exercise trying to tackle something as complex as migration, we had to work within the limits imposed by the time frame. Some of them are identified below. 

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References

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