Modelling changing migration in Bangladesh due to climate change

Abstract

There is fear that climate change will lead to the displacement of thousands of people in the next 100 years. This has led to increased academic interest in predicting the trends of climate-related migration. Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to climate change and is very likely to experience mass climate migration before the end of the century. Efforts have been made to forecast this climate migration using agent based modelling. Less attention has been paid to how the physical climate is represented in these models. In this project, we address this gap, by developing an agent based model which takes a dynamic climate input from climate models. It translates the climate scenario data into a likelihood that an area will experience extreme weather and finds what the migration outcomes of this will be. It can run on an upazila level, the smallest administrative division in Bangladesh. The model shows that there will be over 22 million internal climate migrants in Bangladesh by 2050. This number is much greater than other studies in this area. Most of the migrants originate from the centre of the country and migrate to other upazilas in the centre and to the southeast.