Anticipating the incalculable: the politics of urban climate migration models

It was once assumed that any effort to enumerate relationships between climate change and migration would be hampered by unreliable data sets and no common definition for a 'climate migrant'. Such limitations have not gone away,
but - as new climate migration models proliferate - it has come to appear that they no longer matter. Although modelling has previously been directed at either the international or national level, this speculative approach to climate change and migration has now extended to the urban agenda. The overall project aim is to investigate the power and politics of calculation and number within possibilistic scenario models of urban climate migration, focussed particularly on five cityled interventions in Africa by the Mayors Migration Council that include modelling of current and potential patterns of mobility. This research is positioned within scholarly debates across several academic disciplines; it links the epistemic
geographies of climate change to recent discussion in geography, international relations and security studies on the relationships between calculation, number, and the political. Methodologically, it will deploy a combination of semistructured interviews, discourse analysis and site visits to provide rich and nuanced insight into how such models emerge as the authoritative knowledge of choice, what might be at stake politically when these numeric estimates circulate as established truths, and how this shapes anticipatory action.