The Demographic Perspective on the Environment-Migration Nexus: A Systematic Literature Review

Cecilia Fortunato, Sapienza Università di Roma

Climate change has become a major concern for the international community. The link between environmental hazards and human migration has gained attention over the past decades from academics, media and in public debate. Demography plays a crucial role in understanding the environment-migration nexus as it represents a privileged perspective on population changes and their interactions with environmental issues, resources’ availability and mitigation strategies. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the demographic literature on environmental migration, mapping the knowledge’s advancements in the field, the seminal contributions, the contexts, the data and the analytical techniques that have so far been investigated. We retrieve 3,294 scholarly contributions from the Web of Science bibliographic database of demographic journals and conduct a bibliometric analysis on metadata and a content analysis on the corpus of titles, abstracts and keywords. The content analysis reveals the tight intersection between environmental migration and other social, economic, and political migration related factors, deducted from the frequency of words like gender, family, labour, health, networks, identity, conflict. The thematic evolution reflect the existence of topic clusters in the corpus, the theoretical development on drivers of environmental migration under study and their interactions with non-environmental factors.

Keywords: International Migration, Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Computational social science methods, Migrant Populations and Refugees

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