Topic modelling exposes disciplinary divergence in research on the nexus between human mobility and the environment

Abstract

Human mobility is increasingly associated with environmental and climatic factors. One way to explore how mobility and the environment are linked is to review the research on different aspects of the topic. However, so many relevant articles are published that analysis of the literature using conventional techniques is becoming prohibitively arduous. To overcome this constraint, we have applied automated textual analysis. Using unsupervised topic modelling on 3197 peer-reviewed articles on the nexus between mobility and the environment published over the last 30 years, we identify 37 major topics. Based on their language use, the topics were deeply branched into two categories of focus: Impact and Adaptation. The Impact theme is further clustered into sub-themes on vulnerability and residential mobility, while articles within the Adaptation theme are clustered into governance, disaster management and farming. The analysis revealed opportunities for greater collaboration within environmental mobility research, particularly improved integration of adaptation and impact research. The topic analysis also revealed that, in the last 30 years, very little research appears to have been undertaken in migration destinations or on the fate of environmentally influenced migrants during their migration process and after arriving in a new location. There are also research gaps in gender and Indigenous issues within the Impact theme, as well as on adaptive capacity and capacity-building.

Topic modelling the mobility response to heat and drought

“…After the screening process, we did a cross-reference check with other review articles on climate change migration (Cattaneo et al 2019;Beine and Jeusette 2021;Hoffmann et al 2020Hoffmann et al , 2021Thalheimer et al 2021;Zander et al 2022) to ensure we included all key literature, even if not found through our keyword search of the two databases. Through this process, we added 48 articles, leading to 387 articles in total.…”

“…Amongst the hazards that are frequently concurrent are droughts and heatwaves, which occur over various timescales (Alizadeh et al 2020;Ribeiro et al 2020), and are increasingly being considered drivers of human mobility (Mastrorillo et al 2016;Mueller et al 2020). The literature on this field has been expanding rapidly (Zander et al 2022) to the extent that it can now be reviewed to understand the scope of the research already conducted and the gaps where further research would appear to be warranted.…”

“…Hoffmann et al 2020Beine and Jeusette 2021;Šedová et al 2021) or systematic analyses (e.g. Piguet et al 2018;Hoffmann et al 2021;Thalheimer et al 2021;Zickgraf 2021;Zander et al 2022).…”

“…Callaghan et al 2021;Sietsma et al 2021;Berrang-Ford et al 2021). In the context of climate change-related hazards and mobility, only a few studies have applied unsupervised text mining methods (Thalheimer et al 2021;Zander et al 2022).…”

“…Quantitative evidence on the link between climatic factors and mobility is rare and the existing reviews suffer from disciplinary hurdles (Thalheimer et al 2021). For example, focusing only on climate migration can overlook the demographic literature that considers the many other facets of human mobility, such as residential and amenity mobility (Zander et al 2022). Our study aims to fill this gap by applying a broad range of keywords and an innovative method, topic modelling, which automatically analyses lengthy texts.…”