Trends and future research in climate migration: a bibliometric analysis of forty years

ABSTRACTHuman mobility in the context of environmental change has become a pressing issue in the last four decades, leading to a vast body of literature that this study seeks to analyze. This paper utilises bibliometric tools to provide a comprehensive overview of the structure, themes, and conceptual evolution of climate migration research over the last four decades. Specifically, the study analyzed 476 publications indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases using VOSviewer and SciMAT software. The results indicate that the conceptual evolution of the field occurred primarily between 2007 and 2015. It identified four thematic clusters: water-related hazards, forced migration, climate change and adaptation, and population studies and policymaking. These findings offer important insights for scholars and decision-makers, providing a better understanding of the current state of knowledge and highlighting promising new research areas as well as gaps that require further exploration.KEYWORDS: Migrationenvironment migrationclimate-induced mobilityclimate changesystematic review Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The specific search string was searched in either the title, abstract, or keywords: (‘migrant*’ OR ‘migration’ OR ‘immigration’ OR ‘displacement’) AND (‘clim* change’ OR ‘global warming’ OR ‘climate variability’ OR ‘extreme event’ OR ‘extreme weather’ OR ‘heat wave’ OR ‘sea level*’ OR ‘flood*’ OR ‘drought’ OR ‘storm*’ OR ‘erosion’ OR ‘desertif*’ OR ‘degrad*’).2 VOSviewer is available for free download at https://www.vosviewer.com.3 SciMAT is also available for free download at https://sci2s.ugr.es/scimat/download.html.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Iran National Science Foundation: [Grant Number 99022621].