Abstract
The research on climate-conflict-migration issues started picking up around 2004, 12 years after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established in 1992. The impacts of climate change started to become more visible and related migration and conflict became issues of social and political concern, which has been captured by researchers worldwide. This chapter examines the trends in research on the climate-conflict-migration nexus (326 publications), and broadly on climate migration and refugee concerns (10,138 publications) from 1990 to 2019, using bibliometric indicators. The study materials were sourced from the Scopus database, a bibliographical and citation database which provides access to quality content. For the 326 nexus publications, we capture the geographic distribution, major sub-domains viz, consequence/impact, security/insecurity, policy, health, solution, migration and conflict, top authors engaged in this research, and the top funders. This helped us understand and reflect on the major gaps in the research output and how this could shape future debate on climate-related migration. The findings reveal that research publications have been rising exponentially in the last few years, with a noticeable peak in 2018. The cumulative world output on climate migration and conflict issues increased from 724 (7.14%) publications in the 15 years between 1990 and 2004 to 9413 (92.84%) in the succeeding 15 years from 2005 to 2019. The United States of America record the highest number of publications in this research area. So far, there is less research on the solutions side, thus there is a need to reflect on how this fast-emerging concern can be tackled globally, given that each country is exposed to climate risks but with differentiated vulnerability and adaptive capacities. Large-scale cross-border migration can create resource deficits, thus worsening existing conflicts or shaping new ones.
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The authors are thankful to Mr. Raj Kumar Gupta for going through this manuscript and suggesting appropriate changes.
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Singh, N.K., Gupta, H. (2022). Climate-Conflict-Migration Nexus: An Assessment of Research Trends Based on a Bibliometric Analysis. In: Behnassi, M., Gupta, H., Kruidbos, F., Parlow, A. (eds) The Climate-Conflict-Displacement Nexus from a Human Security Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94144-4_2
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