Since the mid-1980s environmental degradation has increasingly been seen as one cause
of human migration. More recently, anthropogenic climate change has also been understood as a
driver of migration. The forecasts, made by some environmentalists, of millions of so-called environmental refugees have been widely repeated in policymaking circles and in the media. Although these predictions have been widely criticized by geographers and other social scientists for their crude environmental determinism, they have durably shaped the debate on environment and migration and led to many policy proposals. Subsequent work has insisted on the rather more complex and multicausal nature of migration and on the fact that migration should also be understood as a strategy of adaptation to environmental change, rather than as a failure of it. Research on this topic has grown exponentially since the mid-2000s or so and ranges from questions of methods to case studies and critical discourse analyses.