Supplementary file 1_The emergence of climate migration research as an academic field.docx

Although the links between environment and human mobility have been studied for over a century, less attention has been paid to how knowledge has been structured and institutionalized around this topic. To address this gap, the article examines how climate migration scholarship has grown, organized its scholarly community, and gained recognition from external actors.

Drawing on theories of field formation, we analyse four dimensions of academic fields: differentiation from other research areas, epistemic and social coherence among scholars, their social infrastructure and legitimacy-building. The study uses a mixed-methods approach combining bibliometric analysis, document and policy review, and expert interviews. The findings show that the formation of climate migration as a research field was a cumulative process.