QuantMig has achieved its objectives across all five project domains: concepts, driver environments, data and estimates, scenarios, and dissemination and communication. In the first domain, the foundational work package (WP1) has provided the conceptual base for the project, focusing on uncertainty of migration processes, theories, individual decisions, policies and governance.
The second domain included work packages looking at complex driver environments in the countries of origin (WP2), destination (WP3) and transit (WP4). For origins, the analysis concentrated on migration aspirations and their determinants, in particular on conflict and climate change. Innovative simulation methods were also developed to study the outcomes of individual migration decisions. For destination drivers, we focused on policy uncertainty, attitudes, and key destinations of asylum in Europe, and for intra-EU migration, on spatial patterns for EU-born and non-EU-born migrants.
In the domain of data and estimates, QuantMig produced three inventories of migration data, drivers, and policies (WP5), freely available from the project website. The website also hosts the QuantMig Migration Estimates Explorer - a searchable database of harmonised migration estimates within, into and out of Europe, by origin, destination, sex, age, and region of birth. These estimates were developed for 2009-19 (WP6), supplementing and extending earlier work on the Integrated Model of European Migration (IMEM) estimates for 2002-08.
The forecasts and scenarios domain included a review of existing scenario-based approaches to migration futures, followed by an innovative study on migration between Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, confirming the problems with driver-based scenarios (WP7). The scenarios developed in the project (WP8), linking migration to changes in population, labour force, and other variables, are also available online, from the QuantMig Migration Scenarios Explorer. The scenarios follow a novel approach to modelling rare migration events, supplemented by short-term early warnings, mid-range forecasts, and theoretical models for assessing migration uncertainty (WP9).
In the fifth domain, the dissemination and communication activities involved developing and documenting the online tools, including the simulation model (WP10). Stakeholder-oriented activities included two technical webinars, two high-level expert meetings, one policy event, several policy briefs, a set of school materials with an online quiz app, as well as a suite of other activities and outcomes, such as publications, conference talks, videos or podcasts (WP11). The now-archived Twitter account (@QuantMig) remained very active throughout the project, ensuring high levels of user engagement and online presence of QuantMig.
The QuantMig website, www.quantmig.eu documents all the achievements of the project, including nearly 50 public reports, three open inventories - of migration data, drivers and migration policies, two interactive explorers - of estimates and scenarios, all educational materials, as well as links to publications and key project events. The data generated in the project are openly available from the QuantMig community on the Zenodo repository, at zenodo.org/communities/quantmig.
