Projecting Climate Migration in Bangladesh using Agent Based Modelling and Climate Data

Orla O'Neill¹Guus J. M. Velders¹Bishawjit Mallick^2*Kelsea Best³

• ¹Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, Netherlands
• ²Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
• ³The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States

There is fear that climate change will lead to the displacement of millions of people in the next 100 years. This has led to increased academic interest in estimating the trends of climate-related migration. Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to climate change and is very likely to experience mass climate migration before the end of the century. Efforts have been made to forecast this climate migration using agent based modelling. Less attention has been paid to how the physical climate is represented in these models. We address this gap, by developing an agent based model which takes dynamic climate input from climate models, i.e. data on temperature, precipitation and wind speed. It translates climate scenario data from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) into a likelihood that a region in Bangladesh will experience extreme weather (heatwaves, floods, cyclones) and finds the possible migration outcomes. It can run on an upazila level, the smallest administrative division in Bangladesh. The model shows that there will be an accumulative number of over 22 million internal climate migrants in Bangladesh by 2050. This number is much greater than other studies in this area. In our model, most of the migrants originate from the centre of the country and migrate to other upazilas in the centre and the southeast.