Funding shapes research: the questions asked, the methods used, the outcomes sought. This relationship between funding and research is complex and depends on changing funding landscapes, layered institutional negotiations, researchers’ varying autonomy, disciplinary specificities, and much more besides. In migration studies, there is a long-standing, live discussion about the need to work with or against funders’ and policymakers’ categories (Bakewell, 2008; Skilbrei, 2021), especially given how little “impact” migration research appears to have on policy (Kalir & Cantat, 2020; Natter & Welfens, 2024).

Prior analyses have already pointed out the “uneven geography of research on environmental migration”. In 2016, funding acknowledgements in the papers in the CliMig database suggested that the quasi-totality of funding originates in Europe, the USA, and to a lesser extent Australia and Canada (Piguet et al., 2018). This situation is evidently problematic insofar as it “centers Global North epistemologies”, privileging Europe and North America as spaces of knowledge production, which the rest of the world then receives (Dutta, 2025). That funding so disproportionately originates from Europe and North America inevitably biases the field towards the interests, concerns, and objectives of those epistemic communities, to the detriment of the views, values, and priorities of migrants, researchers, and governments in the countries outside Europe and North America where research takes place.

In short, it is clear that we should collectively, transparently reflect on the impact research funding has had on our field so far, and how it will continue to shape future research. Given that most-cited analysis of climate mobilities uneven research geography now uses data a decade old, updating our mapping of the climate mobilities funding landscape seems as good a place as any to start this self-reflexive effort. In this spirit, we present here a partial timeline of climate mobilities research funding – which we hope to expand with the input of ECMN members and the CliMoHub community. 

Visualising a timeline of climate migration/mobilities research funding

The projects included in this first version of the timeline were identified using basic keyword searches in several online funding databases, the European Union’s CORDIS database,[1] the French National Research Agency’s project database[2], the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) gateway to publicly-funded research,[3] and the United States National Science Foundation. An early version of this timeline was presented in (Durand-Delacre, 2023) and updated for CliMoHub. From the results returned by these searches, we kept only research projects for which the relationship between environmental or climatic change and human mobilities is the central topic, for now excluding network-building grants and funding for individual doctoral projects.

For each project, we collected key information including its title; acronym; funder; project lead institute; project partner(s), principal investigator(s), project description, project budget, start and end dates, and project website. Information was not available for all categories for each project. In addition, we tagged each project with broad thematic keywords including: adaptation; disasters; governance; health; law; media and representation; modelling; migration drivers; norms.

Next steps

By visualising this incomplete timeline of climate mobilities research funding since the early-2000s, we are only just scratching the surface of funding’s influence on our field. Looking forward, we aim to update our mapping of research projects and conduct a more thorough analysis of patterns and trends. For this, we solicit the help of Environmental and Climate Mobilities Network members. If you have information to share about any relevant research projects, please let us know in this short form: here.

Other ways in which we could move forward collectively could include more deliberate and structured research. There are many questions we could ask of the current funding landscape: how funder priorities and programme requirements shape the questions we ask and methods we employ, who gets to lead the research, and who is relegated to secondary project partner or participant roles, what kinds of results are expected and achieved, and whether these projects have any influence over policy discourse and action.

To answer these questions, we could engage in a more systematic survey of funding sources, e.g. by pulling funding information from the funding acknowledgements of papers in the CliMig database, updating and expanding the work of Piguet and colleagues. Qualitative interviews of principal investigators, project partners and participants could shed light on the influence and legacy of past projects. More direct engagement with the wider literature on funding arrangements and the production of knowledge (Gläser & Velarde, 2018) would likely generate many more valuable questions and approaches.