Geografie 2025, 130, 221-250
Climate and migration in historical perspective
, Rudolf Brázdil1,2, Sam White3,4, Qing Pei5, Dominik Collet3,6
1Czech Academy of Sciences, Global Change Research Institute CAS, Brno, Czechia
2Masaryk University, Faculty of Science, Department of Geography, Brno, Czechia
3Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Center for Advanced Studies, Oslo, Norway
4University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Political History, Finland
5Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Department of Chinese History and Culture, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
6University of Oslo, Institute for Archaeology, Conservation and History, Oslo, Norway
Received May 2025
Accepted August 2025
Migration is an inherent part of human history. It has been linked to socioeconomic, political, demographic, and environmental factors, and increasingly to past climate variability, climate change, and natural hazards, including extreme weather events. This paper discusses migration as both a cascading effect of climate change impacts and an adaptive response to climate-related risks. It distills key patterns in regional and global studies of past climate-migration links; provides a topical overview of existing studies dealing with climate-induced migration during historical times in Europe, North America, and Asia; and summarizes key perspectives of climate and migration research on the historical past.
Keywords
migration, mobility, climate variability and change, natural disaster, weather-related hazard.
Funding
This publication includes research supported by the OP JAK under Grant No. CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004593 ‘‘Ready for the future: understanding long-term resilience of the human culture (RES-HUM)’’ and funded by Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University. The workshop “Climate and Migration: Historical and Present Perspectives” was supported by PAGES; this article is a product of the PAGES-CRIAS working group. Dominik Collet and Sam White acknowledge the support of the Center for Advanced Study in Oslo, Norway, that funded the research project The Nordic Little Ice Age during the Academic year 2024/25. Dominik Collet also received support from the Norwegian Research Council grant 315441 (ClimateCultures).
