Images of families displaced by floods, prolonged droughts or extreme storms have become a distressingly regular feature of the daily news. As the impact of climate change intensifies, so does concern over its effects on human mobility. Ongoing changes to the world’s climate now raise a salient, apparently simple question: to what extent does climate change cause migration?

The answer is anything but simple.

Over recent decades, the relationship between climate change and migration has become an active, dynamic field of research. But far from producing a unified view, the topic is still plagued with major conceptual, methodological and political discrepancies.

Our new research project, published in the journal Papers, aims to better understand the discord. To conduct our study, we first interviewed international experts in the field of migrations, climate change, development cooperation, law, and public policies. We then analysed the results using the Delphi technique, a method designed to identify levels of consensus among specialists.

The results paint a picture as telling as it is disturbing. Despite growing academic and political interest in climate-induced mobility, there is still limited consensus on some of the fundamental issues surrounding it.

Does climate move people?

For years, discussion was polarised between two positions: that climate change was a direct cause of major population displacements, or that it only acted alongside other economic, social, or political elements.

Today, most specialists seem to hold a position somewhere between these two extremes. Although extreme climate events (such as hurricanes, floods........

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