Anticipating the incalculable: the politics of urban climate migration models

曾经有人认为，列举气候变化和移民之间关系的任何努力都会受到不可靠的数据集和对“气候移民”的共同定义的阻碍。这些限制并没有消失，但随着新的气候迁移模型的激增，它们似乎不再重要。尽管建模以前是针对国际或国家一级的，但这种对气候变化和移民的投机性方法现在已扩展到城市议程。该项目的总体目标是调查城市气候迁移可能性情景模型中计算和数字的力量和政治，特别侧重于市长移民理事会在非洲的五项城市干预措施，其中包括对当前和潜在的流动模式进行建模。这项研究定位于几个学术学科的学术辩论中；它将气候变化的认识论地理与最近地理学、国际关系和安全研究中关于计算、数字和政治之间的关系的讨论联系起来。在方法上，它将结合半结构化访谈、话语分析和现场访问，提供丰富而细致入微的洞察力，以了解这些模型如何成为权威的选择知识，当这些数字估计作为既定事实传播时，政治上可能面临什么风险，以及这如何塑造预期行动。

It was once assumed that any effort to enumerate relationships between climate change and migration would be hampered by unreliable data sets and no common definition for a 'climate migrant'. Such limitations have not gone away,but - as new climate migration models proliferate - it has come to appear that they no longer matter. Although modelling has previously been directed at either the international or national level, this speculative approach to climate change and migration has now extended to the urban agenda. The overall project aim is to investigate the power and politics of calculation and number within possibilistic scenario models of urban climate migration, focussed particularly on five cityled interventions in Africa by the Mayors Migration Council that include modelling of current and potential patterns of mobility. This research is positioned within scholarly debates across several academic disciplines; it links the epistemicgeographies of climate change to recent discussion in geography, international relations and security studies on the relationships between calculation, number, and the political. Methodologically, it will deploy a combination of semistructured interviews, discourse analysis and site visits to provide rich and nuanced insight into how such models emerge as the authoritative knowledge of choice, what might be at stake politically when these numeric estimates circulate as established truths, and how this shapes anticipatory action.