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Open research questions in Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration

250 gap statements mined from Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 2,108 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.

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What the literature leaves open

  • The gap in the literature is the lack of consideration of gendered traditional knowledge in climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts. The study identifies the need to address the marginalisation of women's knowledge in formal decision-making. The authors highlight the importance of recognising the gendered politics of authority, labour, and recognition in climate adaptation efforts.

    Gendering traditional knowledge in Pacific climate adaptation and disaster management: a critical narrative review · 2026 · DOI

  • Lack of consideration of the intersection of climate exposure, concentrated employment, and residential socio-economic disadvantage.

    Heat, employment and deprivation: compound climate burden in an island tourism economy · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research could focus on strengthening resilience by examining different combinations of livelihood strategies and analyzing the decision-making processes underlying migration choices.

    Flood-induced livelihood vulnerability and migration as an adaptation strategy: evidence from farm households of the flood-prone region of Eastern India · 2026 · DOI

  • The study highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of staying preferences and the complexity of voluntariness in immobility decisions. The paper argues that existing research has overlooked the importance of subjective narratives surrounding land and livelihood losses.

    Pluralising environmental immobility: Diverse staying strategies in the face of environmental change in the Bengal Delta · 2026 · DOI

  • This review has some limitations that future empirical studies could address. The study has demonstrated that while heat inequity is emerging in cities, studies are often concentrated in the Global North, with less research on the Global South, particularly in Africa.

    Climate Justice and Heat Inequity in Poor Urban Communities: The Lens of Transitional Justice, Green Climate Gentrification, and Adaptation Praxis · 2025 · DOI

  • These gaps should be explored in future multilingual or mixed-method reviews.

    Who speaks for climate migrants? A justice-oriented bibliometric analysis of Global South research · 2025 · DOI

  • By combining the key themes of climate resilience, economic diversification, debt management, community empowerment, institutional strengthening, and innovative financing, we propose the following recommendations for a holistic strategy to address the challenges faced by SIDSs in achieving the SDGs.

    Exploring Sustainable Development Goal Research Trajectories in Small Island Developing States · 2024 · DOI

  • Historic observations may not be suitable for model calibration. Accounting for the numerous factors not explicitly represented in the model is a challenge.

    Simulation of Flood-Induced Human Migration at the Municipal Scale: A Stochastic Agent-Based Model of Relocation Response to Coastal Flooding · 2024 · DOI

  • Existing migration models at larger spatial scales do not capture relevant social responses to flooding at the local and municipal levels. Projecting migration dynamics into the future becomes difficult due to uncertainties in human–environment interactions, particularly when historic observations are used for model calibration.

    Simulation of Flood-Induced Human Migration at the Municipal Scale: A Stochastic Agent-Based Model of Relocation Response to Coastal Flooding · 2024 · DOI

  • While short-term interventions are essential for alleviating the immediate hardship of disasters and displacement, resilience alone is insufficient to address their lasting and compounding effects.

    Displaced Communities: Can They Be Healthy? · 2025 · DOI

  • The effectiveness of migration as a climate adaptation strategy is not well understood. There is a need to investigate the determinants and consequences of migration decisions in the context of climate change.

    Migration as an Adaptation Measure to Achieve Resilient Lifestyle in the Face of Climate-Induced Drought: Insight from the Thar Desert in Pakistan · 2024 · DOI

  • The study highlights the need for targeted interventions to support migrants in these areas. The research also identifies the lack of understanding of how distress migrants cope with their dissatisfaction as a major challenge.

    From Crisis to Peri-Urban Precarity: The Dynamics of Place Disutility in Distress Migration · 2026 · DOI

  • The study used non-probability accidental sampling, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. The sample size was 110 respondents, which may not be representative of the larger population of distress migrants. The study did not use probability-based sampling due to the unknown size of the distress migrant population.

    From Crisis to Peri-Urban Precarity: The Dynamics of Place Disutility in Distress Migration · 2026 · DOI

  • There is a lack of comparative assessments of climate extremes across contrasting climatic regimes. The study aims to fill this gap by analyzing Lagos and Mumbai.

    A tale of two coastal megacities: asymmetric trends in heat and rainfall extremes · 2026 · DOI

  • Evidence on how social conditions influence household vulnerability to unreliable water supplies in the Upper Zambezi River Basin remains limited. There is a need to understand the vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities of rural communities to climate change impacts on water supply.

    Vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities of rural communities to climate change impacts on water supply in the Upper Zambezi River Basin · 2026 · DOI

  • Climate change and global warming are increasingly impacting urban areas worldwide. Urban populations are not equally affected by these challenges. There is a need for fine-scale, longitudinal, and community research to inform urban climate adaptation planning.

    Spatial associations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations with climate exposure, green cover, and socioeconomic advantage in New South Wales, Australia · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research should focus on fine-scale, longitudinal, and community research to inform urban climate adaptation planning. Studies should examine the relationships between urban environmental conditions and Indigenous population distributions in other contexts. Research should aim to develop more effective strategies to support vulnerable populations.

    Spatial associations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations with climate exposure, green cover, and socioeconomic advantage in New South Wales, Australia · 2026 · DOI

  • We argue that although these approaches answer many important questions, they are also limited by their reliance on the constitutive norms of the current state‐based international order.

    Climate Migration · 2026 · DOI

  • Recovery migration behavior after environmental disasters (Curtis et al., 2015; Fussell et al., 2014) is documented in the literature, but the paper does not integrate a migration systems approach with spatial regression models to distinguish between permanent environmental migration and temporary displacement-recovery patterns across county-level spatial units.

    Spatial perspective on environmental migration: Empirical insights from a spatiotemporal approach in the United States, 1970–2010 · 2026 · DOI

  • The paper acknowledges Arctic North America climate impacts on migration (Chi et al., 2024) but does not implement the spatiotemporal approach to analyze how spatial autocorrelation and regional spillover effects differ in polar versus temperate environmental migration systems.

    Spatial perspective on environmental migration: Empirical insights from a spatiotemporal approach in the United States, 1970–2010 · 2026 · DOI

  • The research highlights the importance of considering the complex and differentiated ways human im/mobility is shaped by high-risk environments.

    ‘Monsoon mobilities’: moving beyond the binary of migration and ‘trapped populations’ in a vulnerable mountain community in Nepal · 2026 · DOI

  • Highlighting the socioeconomic dimensions, our findings advocate addressing climate finance disparities, enhancing research in underexplored areas such as gender equality, and addressing challenges such as invasive species for sustainable development.

    Exploring Sustainable Development Goal Research Trajectories in Small Island Developing States · 2024 · DOI

  • Responding to this gap in knowledge, this review paper first introduces the concept of climate mobility.

    Rethinking Climate Extreme Events and (Im)mobility From a Place‐Based Perspective · 2025 · DOI

  • The study identifies a gap in the understanding of the role of transnational networks, social cohesion, government support, and digital connectivity in climate adaptation success among internally displaced persons.

    Transnational Networks and Social Cohesion Among Climate-Displaced Populations: A Cross-Sectional Study in Coastal Indonesia · 2026 · DOI

  • Cross-sectional design precludes informal networks and leaders, explicit engagement of temporal inference regarding causality; while we women and marginalized groups in adaptation present transnational networks as predictors of decision-making, and integration of traditional adaptation success, the reverse causal pathway— knowledge and social structures into modern whereby successful adaptation enables maintenance…

    Transnational Networks and Social Cohesion Among Climate-Displaced Populations: A Cross-Sectional Study in Coastal Indonesia · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration

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Open questions raised by papers listed on this page include: (1) The gap in the literature is the lack of consideration of gendered traditional knowledge in climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts (“Gendering traditional knowledge in Pacific climate adaptation and disaster…”, 2026); (2) Lack of consideration of the intersection of climate exposure, concentrated employment, and residential socio-economic disadvantage (“Heat, employment and deprivation: compound climate burden in an island tourism…”, 2026); (3) Future research could focus on strengthening resilience by examining different combinations of livelihood strategies and analyzing the decision-making processes underlying migration choices (“Flood-induced livelihood vulnerability and migration as an adaptation strategy:…”, 2026); (4) The research also identifies the lack of understanding of how distress migrants cope with their dissatisfaction as a major challenge (“From Crisis to Peri-Urban Precarity: The Dynamics of Place Disutility in…”, 2026); (5) There is a lack of comparative assessments of climate extremes across contrasting climatic regimes (“A tale of two coastal megacities: asymmetric trends in heat and rainfall…”, 2026). 250 gap statements have been mined from Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 2,108 papers on the topic; the gaps come from whichever of those papers state one. They are mostly the research gaps the authors state and the papers' abstracts, plus future-work, limitations and challenges passages. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one, so you can read the original claim in context.

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