Agent-based modeling of environment-migration linkages: a review

Abstract

Environmental change can lead to human migration and vice versa. Agent-based models (ABMs) are valuable tools to study these linkages because they can represent individual migration decisions of human actors. Indeed, there is an increasing, yet small, number of ABMs that consider the natural environment in rural migration processes. Therefore, we reviewed 15 ABMs of environment-migration linkages in rural contexts to synthesize the current state of the art. The reviewed ABMs are mostly applied in tropical contexts, serve a wide range of purposes, and cover diverse scales and types of environmental factors, migration processes, and social-ecological feedbacks. We identified potential for future model development with respect to the (1) complexity of environmental influence factors, (2) representation of relevant migration flows, and (3) type of social-ecological couplings. We found that existing models tend to not include fully integrated feedbacks and provide recommendations for the further development of ABMs to contribute to an understanding of the environment-migration-nexus in the future.Ecology and Society 23(2): 41 https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol23/iss2/art41/

Agent-based modeling for migration and modern slavery research: a systematic review

“…An interdisciplinary approach is critical to be able to integrate theoretical and empirical knowledge of a social phenomenon into a mathematical model [20]. In fact, we concur with the other reviews, future ABM work in this area would benefit from interdisciplinary approaches to every stage of model development to address research questions that cut across social and ecological studies, as well as disciplines such as economics, psychology, geography, and complexity science [2,4]. Diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives will strengthen the real-world likeness of these highly complex, dynamic, and socially embedded models and may present new uses for existing data for model calibration.…”

“…Similar to Klabunde and Willeken's review and Thober and colleagues' review [2,4], this review presents a range of unique models in examining both the model Fig. 4 Included articles by year of publication aims and model development processes.…”

“…As referenced earlier, to our knowledge, there are three reviews of migration ABMs relevant to the aim of this review, including Klabunde and Willeken's review focusing on decision-model choice including integration of social networks (n = 22 included publications) [2], Thober and colleagues' review of ABMs of environmental-migration linkages (n = 21) [4], and Bell and colleagues' brief background review on ABMs exploring migration push-pull factors to present their migration ABM framework (nonsystematic, n = ~ 8) [3]. Other examples of ABM reviews include previous reviews on the use of ABM to study other social or health science topics, such as urban crime (n = 45) [32], non-communicable diseases (NCDs) (n = 22) [33], obesity (n = 38) [34], public health (non-systematic, n = ~ 45) [21], and health systems (n = 11) [35].…”

“…The model descriptions in the articles included in this review were overwhelmingly opaque with various critical details omitted. This review is not the first to critique the lack of a 'best practice' in reporting model development [1,4] and as one reviewer noted there are severe limitations to systematic reviews that aim to synthesise findings across a body of studies whose methods cannot be easily compared, not to mention that there is still work to be done to develop standard methods for systematically reviewing ABMs [34].…”

“…This review builds on the work of modelers that have been using and reviewing the use of ABM to explore emergent trends in migration, particularly migration influenced by environmental changes, social networks and decision processes, such as utility maximization [2][3][4]. Bell, Hernandez and Oppenheimer pointed out that many of the ABMs in this field focus on singular push-factors (e.g.…”