Natural Hazards and Migration in Madagascar: Towards an Integrated Monitoring and Modeling for Mitigation and Adaptation

Climate hazards bear visible effects on natural and human systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Scholars agree that climate hazards are crucially linked to migration and threaten to derail sustainable development goal efforts.

Taking Madagascar, a LMIC characterized by dual exposure to climatic hazards and increasing human migration, CHAIN aims to achieve the following intertwined objectives:Develop a cost-effective procedure to improve our measure of migration in areas vulnerable to climate change with low capacity for data collection, and over sufficient spatial and temporal scale required for modeling these processes.Create and validate methods to measure multiple hazards using state-of-the-art numerical modeling, remote sensing, and satellite data available to the public.Contribute a more human-centric approach to quantifying the relationships underlying migration as adaptive responses to socio-environmental change by exploring the roles of migration duration in a multi-hazard environment, as well as the vulnerability of specific demographic groups.Investigate anticipated dynamic migration patterns accounting for adaptation and policy responses and their associated feedbacks.

CHAIN will adopt a multidisciplinary human-centric approach to develop, integrate, and supplement data and models to research complex migration-hazard relationships and improve evidence production, policy debate, and decision-making.