Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce Fabien S. P. Cottier of the Center for Integrated Earth Information System (CIESIN) will be delivering our next research seminar, "Climate Variability, Migration and Immobility" on Thursday, February 27, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in Forum Room 301. (If attending in-person, you must be a CUID holder.)
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list.
ABSTRACT:
Owing to the apparent rise in the magnitude of migration flows across the world, the saliency of migration has been high on the political agenda lately. This has led some to question whether climate change may be responsible for the recent observed increases in migration. Yet, despite significant advances, important research gaps persist due to concerns about the reliability of migration data, heterogeneities in mobility patterns in response to climate variability across contexts and distance travelled, as well as the type of migration flows considered (e.g. seasonal, permanent or irregular). In addition, evidence has emerged that suggests that in some places climate change might counter-intuitively decrease migration.
As part of this talk, he will share insights on the impact of climate variability and change on migration that have emerged from the research he is currently conducting at Columbia and supported applying a variety of quantitative approaches including econometrics, Bayesian statistical modeling and agent-based modeling (ABM) across a variety of contexts, including sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and India.
BIO:
Fabien Cottier is an associate Research Scientist with the Center for Integrated Earth System Information (CIESIN). He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Geneva (2018) and a Master in Comparative and International Studies from the ETH Zürich (2012). In his research, Fabien studies the causes and consequences of migration and displacement. Specifically, his research investigates how environmental change influences migration patterns, as well as under what condition does in-migration result in communal violence. Previously, Fabien was a visiting scholar with the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace studies at Columbia University (2019–2020) and a postdoctoral research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (2020–2022). His research has been published in World Development, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Civil Wars, Nature Food, Frontiers in Climate and the International Journal of Climatology. He is also a co-author of the recent African Shifts report that was published under the auspice of the Global Center for Climate Mobility.
Fabien is currently collaborating on a DoD Minerva Initiative research project that examines the drivers of migration in West Africa and Central America and is the principal investigator of a recent Columbia President's Global Innovation Fund (PGIF) award.
