Modelling migration futures: development and testing of the Rainfalls Agent-Based Migration Model – Tanzania

Abstract

This paper describes the conceptual and practical development and testing of the Rainfalls Agent-Based Migration ModelTanzania (RABMM-T). Drawing upon the literature on the process of developing and parameterizing a social simulation in the absence of spatio-temporal data, the paper outlines the translation of the conceptual framework into a working agent-based model. The possible impact of a change in local rainfall variability and mean upon household income, food production, and therefore the resilience and migration of members, is simulated to permit consideration of the possible impact of the artificial scenarios tested. In addition to the influence of changing rainfall, other non-rainfall scenarios are tested to explore the scale of the changes simulated. It is proposed that while a relatively clear impact of rainfall scenarios upon household resilience is simulated, the impact upon migration of household members is generally less clear. Furthermore, demographic and societal changes to the model are also seen to clearly contribute to the simulation outputs generated. The paper concludes that RABMM-T offers the first step in developing a potentially valuable resource for producing comparable migration forecasts that consider a range of contributory mechanisms. However, careful parameterization is required to ensure the quality and value of model outputs.

Mobility endowment and entitlements mediate resilience in rural livelihood systems

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A universal model for predicting human migration under climate change: examining future sea level rise in Bangladesh

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Household migration in disaster impact analysis: incorporating behavioural responses to risk

“…ABMs are bottom-up models, focusing on how system properties emerge through the interactions of heterogeneous individual agents (Grimm et al 2006). ABMs have recently been used to study household migration under climate change (Cai et al 2013;Smith 2014;Kniveton et al 2012). The take-home message from this literature is that migration occurs through a chain of causalities between climatic and macroeconomic drivers as well as interactions through social networks.…”

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