Futures of conflict risk, migration and equity implications

Abstract

Integrated socioeconomic and environmental scenarios have matured over the past decades in terms of scientific methodology and policy relevance. Contrary to these advances, less progress has been made on scenarios of conflict, migration, and equity implications in the context of environmental and socioeconomic change. On the one hand, this is not surprising due to the complex, irregular and ethical dimensions involved which are hard to quantify. On the other hand, these societal dynamics can alter the effectiveness of sustainable development strategies, underlining the importance to better understand their possible future trajectories. The main objective of this thesis is to explore the possibilities to project futures of conflict, migration, and equity implications by using various methods (Machine Learning, literature-informed vulnerability overlays and expert elicitation), to advance the field of scenario studies.