Global Mobility and Climate Vulnerabilities

A governments ability to plan and implement responsible migration policies hinges upon access to accurate data and robust modelling. Existing databases of regional populations and internal and international migration flows do not fill this need, as they are coarse-grained and limited in their geographical and temporal coverage. These limitations further prevent analyses of climate-induced demographic change at sub-national levels, particularly in less-developed parts of the globe, thereby arguably representing the greatest constraint to better understanding how climate change affects human mobility. Despite the current sense of urgency, we do not know how many climate-induced migrants will move, where they will move to, nor when. Conversely, we are currently unable to identify those most in need, namely the involuntary immobile who being unable to move will likely bear the brunt of climate change.

Our project, to date a collaboration between UWA and the United Nations, will therefore provide the most complete global analyses of climate change on internal and international migration ever conceived, while also crucially identifying trapped populations. To this end, we have digitized archival records, comprising over 2,000 censuses, originally recorded between 1820 and 2010, in order to construct and publish three pioneering global databases: 1) disaggregated population count data by sub-national regions 1880-2020, 2) internal lifetime migration by sub-national regions 1880-2020 and 3) international lifetime immigration by sub-national region 1880-2020. Collectively, when successful these data should represent nothing short of a 10,000 times improvement on what is currently available.

The overarching aim of the project is to provide not only the data infrastructure for all countries globally, but also to conduct the most comprehensive historical, current and future analyses of the links between climate change and human mobility, which in turn will feed into the leading global analyses as provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Since July 2023, Dr Parsons has been spearheading the project in collaboration with successive cohorts of UWA students, some of whom now have UN contracts. Students from the Computer Science Department are currently being requested to work alongside the existing teams working on the project, under the supervision of Dr Parsons for two specific purposes:

1. To develop software that can assist in applying Optical Character Recognition in relation to our curated PDFs which are all data tables - that we have identified from trawling through many millions of pages of archive documentation, in order to transfer the data from PDF pages into a useable format .csv, .dta etc.
2. To develop software that will make the task of creating shapefiles from old (and often extremely interesting) maps, likely using Python. This task will be essential in harmonising our data, since, on top of collating the underlying population data, we also need to harmonise both the data and the related geographies across all countries and over our sample period.

Conditional on the success of these tasks and research funding, there is the possibility that some students might be able to stay attached to the project in paid capacities once the CITS3200 has been completed.

Client

IP Exploitation Model

Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering The University of Western Australia Last modified: 12 July 2024 Modified By: Michael Wise