A Delphi survey of immigration to the UK to 2060, with particular reference to environmental mobility

Abstract

Over the next 50 years the potential impact on human livelihoods of environmental change could be considerable. Increased levels of human mobility may be one possible response to climate change. However, there is huge uncertainty about precisely how many people will move and about the destinations that will be chosen by environmentally driven migrants. This paper seeks to offer some quantitative estimates of the scale of uncertainty that surrounds forecasts of environmental migration to the UK. A Delphi Survey was used to analyse the opinions of a panel of experts. The experts anticipated that environmental migration would rise over the next 50 years, but had limited confidence in their estimates, pointing to the need to consider analysis of the reasons for uncertainty in relation to forecasts of environmental mobility. The survey suggests that only a minority of environmentally driven migrants will arrive as ‘displacement’ movers. Mediterranean Europe was cited as a potential source of environmentally driven migrants to the UK, not because this region is most at risk from climate change in global terms but because of the relative ease of migration from there to Britain under EU legislation.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jakub Bijak: orcid.org/0000-0002-2563-5040

ORCID for Teresa McGowan: orcid.org/0009-0002-9231-3743

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