 So good morning and welcome, my name is Julie Lendorfer, I am the head of research and migration law at the International Organization for Migration in Austria and in the name of myself and my team I would like to extend a warm welcome to this year's Austrian EMN conference on forecasting global migration. Thank you so much for connecting from all over the world. We are extremely pleased to be able to introduce Mr. Peter Wevinger, Director General for Migration in the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior, who will offer some word of welcome. Following Mr. Wevinger's opening remarks, it is my pleasure to introduce Mrs. Marion Benbaub-Fisterer, head of the country office of the International Organization for Migration in Austria. She will kindly walk us through the program of the day and welcome us on behalf of the IOM. After Mr. Wevinger's and Mrs. Benbaub-Fisterer's brief welcoming remarks, we will have the pleasure to invite Mrs. Liz Colette, a special advisor to the IOM Director General, to the virtual podium for her keynote speech. Dear Mr. Wevinger, I would kindly pass the word to you now. Patient. I think you need to unmute yourself again. Okay, I'll try again. Can you hear me now? Okay. Yes, we can hear you. Thank you very much for that kind introduction and also for that kind invitation. It's really tricky to organize such a big convention, such a big meeting, and I think it's more than a meeting, it's more a platform where we all interact together and especially you interact together. This is a lot of work, so thank you, first of all, to your team, also to Benbaub-Fisterer, also to the Austrian team, thank you to Beers. Also, when I look to Liz Colette, thank you for joining us. This is really a pleasure to see you. The title forecasting, the future of global migration, of course, forecasting is extremely difficult. There is not really a possibility to predict future scenarios of migration. We all know that, but I think the possibility to have the exchange to each other, to also have experts and also have a scientific how to get an approach and possible scenarios and possible developments in migration can help a lot, especially also policy makers. And I think this is also what we see now is not only a digital interface, I think somewhere, how we communicate, there are a lot of interfaces, but this is also a know-how interface, how we can combine your insights and your world and different worlds and how can we bring those different worlds approaches and use together that we can contribute to a better migration system. Of course, the question is, and I discussed it also a lot with Liz, what is better? This is not really a precise term. This is a very subjective and volatile thing. What is better? But I think better for those who are in the countries of origin for the migrants, but also for the societies where migrants are living and also host societies. So if we manage to contribute to a system that for those three pillars that I described right now, I think then it's better. And what we have seen also recently in the last few days, better means also less suffering on the route, especially when it comes to flight migration. So less drownings and less dead people in the Mediterranean. I think this is also a very important thing, how we should rethink our policymaking when it comes to a better migration system. It's not only about the management, it's also a lot about building a new system. And in those days we've seen just recently, but also in the upcoming month where we will negotiate and discuss the asylum and migration pact on the EU level. I think everything that is going to be discussed today is really essential for a discussion that is really, really linked sometimes with the impression we're discussing different bubbles. And this is extremely important from my point of view to open up those bubbles to combine that and then we get closer to reality to contribute to better in terms of what I try to describe a better migratory system. I think this is a very important thing. Yeah, that's what I would like to, I wanted to share with you. Thank you for giving me the floor and I give the word back to you. Thank you very much for this kind of deductive word. Marianne, over to you. Thank you very much Julia and thank you Peter as well for your insightful and as always thought provoking words. And also thank you very much for the excellent cooperation over the years, in particular within the European Migration Network. It's really appreciated. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, dear participants, on behalf of the International Organization for Migration, it's my real pleasure to welcome you all here to Vienna virtually. And to welcome you to this 2020 Austrian annual conference of the European Migration Network. Those of you still unfamiliar with the EMN or European Migration Network, it is a network that's chaired by the European Commission DG Home. And it's a network which is very alive and implemented actively in 26 member states of the European Union, as well as in Norway. The European Migration Network provides objective, reliable and timely information on asylum and migration to European policymakers. Another thing that the European Migration Network does and that we're all currently part of is to disseminate knowledge about asylum and migration through different ways including this conference today. The annual Austrian EMN conferences are always joint collaborations between the Austrian Ministry of the Interior and IOM. And this year I'm particularly pleased to also welcome IOM's Global Migration Data Analysis Centre in Berlin and the colleagues from Berlin as co-facilitators of this event today. I'd like to say a word of thanks as well. I'd like to put everything I did to the Austrian Ministry of the Interior team headed by Tobias Molander, to our colleagues from the IOM Global Migration Data Analysis Centre and in particular Jasper Tjarden. And to Julio Lindolfo who's actually standing right next to me and to the team that's here in the room in the conference venue in Vienna. It's a shame that you all can't join us in person but it's great to have you here virtually. I'd like to thank all three teams involved in preparing this event for all your hard work and dedication. And in particular for the last minute scramble to completely move it all online and virtually. Thank you very, very much. The topic today, P. W. Mingo already said it is slightly controversial. We're talking about migration forecasting. I think what we can all agree on is that states and other actors around the globe have agreed to work towards well-managed migration governance. One is gently stepping the better issue Peter. What we want to have when he comes better is a better understanding of the factors shaping migration. And we'd like to make the scope and nature of future development in migration more predictable. More predictability allows us to recognize opportunities and challenges earlier and plan ahead with more foresight and therefore better. And here I go again. You can get back into the better discussion later on maybe. In other words, migration forecast scenarios and early warning systems can improve our understanding of a global migration phenomenon. Both from a research and from a policy perspective. At the same time, we all know and we do witness at present all of us that migration is sensitive to uncreditable and high impact events. COVID-19 has affected global mobility in a number of ways. It's created travel disruptions. We've seen a lot of mobility restrictions. And COVID-19 in the sense of this conference today is challenging the accuracy and current migration predictions and future scenarios. So the aim that we have today is to promote a critical reflection and a differentiated understanding of future migration scenarios and proactive migration policies. As Julia said, I'm going to very briefly walk you through the program of today and briefly highlight our excellent speakers and the profound expertise that they'll be sharing with us today. And thank you very much to all the speakers in advance for being with us. I'm really pleased to introduce two speakers, two wonderful ladies right at the beginning of the conference who will be setting the scene and laying the foundation of today's further discussions. I'm really pleased to welcome Liz Collette as our keynote speaker. Liz will share IOM's perspective and approaches in migration forecasting and she'll focus on longer-term trends and the challenges of a volatile landscape. And then Avanazost will provide us with a comprehensive overview of the main predictive models that are currently in use. She'll be looking at forecast scenario studies and early warning alert systems and be explaining to us what they actually are and how to use them. We'll then look at three different research projects that will be presented to us by Susanna Meldes, André Gröder and Jakob Bjak. And they'll give us a snapshot of migration predictions and how they are applied. We'll then break for about 15 minutes which hopefully will allow us all to stretch our legs, grab some coffee and maybe look up from the screen for a few minutes and rest our eyes. And the next session will begin in Vienna time. It's 11.30. And whatever time that is, some way you're joining. 11.30 Vienna time in any case. We'll start our second session where Faena Muntz, Fabian Zal, Tobias Heideland and Peter Stendl will identify common elements of future migration trends to Europe and challenges of accurately predicting migration, particularly in view of unexpected events. So I believe that we'll be talking about COVID-19 in that panel, but not only. We'll then go into a one hour break and we can be here in the conference at 2pm Vienna time. Rita Behrend, Teddy Wilkin, Michael Clements and Mathias Zeicher will speak to us in exchange about the extent to which predictive methods have been used to inform policy decisions and how policy has influenced migration forecasting. Our final session begins at 3.45 Vienna time. Tobias Molanda, Susana Felca Jens, who I can see has just joined us. Thomas Liebig from OSCD and Alexander Scherum will explore what migration forecasting will look like in future by ex-unleaning both technological as well as policy-relevant advances. Dear participants, ladies and gentlemen, please use the opportunity today to engage in the conversation with the experts around the table. Please use the opportunity to add to the conversation and ask questions via the chat function. There will be time for questions and answers and panel discussions during each of the sessions and our facilitators will do their best to channel all of your questions and comments to the respective panelists. One final announcement that I'm extremely pleased to share with you and that is that the conference results will be published soon in a special issue of the bimonthly journal Migration Policy Practice. So please do keep a look out for this publication, which is forthcoming quite soon. I'd like to thank all the speakers of this conference again for your input and contributions, not only to today's event but in particular also to the journal, which again is upcoming and should be published soon after the conference. And I'd like to very warmly welcome everybody once more to this annual Austrian E&M conference. It's a pleasure to have you with us and I wish us all a wonderful, enjoyable and engaging day. And now I am particularly delighted to welcome and present our keynote speaker to you. I'm never quite sure whether Liz Collette actually means any kind of an introduction, but she's old one so I'll give it to her. It's a pleasure to have you with us, Liz. Liz is now the Special Advisor for Policy and Strategy to IOM's Director-General. She joins us today from my own headquarters in Geneva. Liz has held a number of extremely important positions and from where I'm standing today, she looks like one of the migration policy whizzes that we have. Liz was the most other thing, the Founder-Ector of the Migration Policy Institute in Europe and Senior Advisor to MPI's Transatlantic Council on Migration. She's held a number of other very important posts including she served a senior policy analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels and was responsible for the EPC Migration Program. I could go on and on but I won't. So if I could say that we're extremely pleased to have you with us today, thank you very much for joining us and the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marianne and Julia and thank you to all the team for inviting me and allowing me to join and also making me blush before 10am in the morning with your kind words. You did however admit the fact that my career started with an internship at IOM in the research department so I feel like today I'm coming full circle back to where I started. We are virtual this morning but I think our discussion will be no less substantive for that and I think this is an extremely important event in discussion to be having today. And I'd also like to thank you for the opportunity to read some of the fascinating papers that have come from this conference and some of which I look forward to passing them to Director General who I think is also extremely interested in what capacity we have to think through what the future will hold and what that will mean for IOM. The challenges of forecasting on an issue with complex of migration have really been brought to the fore by the pandemic we are experiencing in 2020. But similarly it is also brought home the importance of constantly assessing, adjusting and reconfiguring our understanding of the drivers that lead to migration and how it has managed understanding the interconnections between those drivers and to understand how we might prepare for future policy and improve policy to make sure that those we serve are well supported. At moments like this we might feel like we want to give up on the desire to understand the future but the pandemic has as I said not made forecasting defunct but it's allowed us to be more circumspect perhaps and more thoughtful in how we apply it and critically avoid too much hubris. I'm certainly struck by one of the papers that noted that most predictive efforts by governments and others turn out to be wrong. I can also tell of an anecdote of one particular EU member state who short term forecasting on arrivals was so accurate that they were accused of fixing the numbers in the press in advance. So sometimes you can be too good at forecasting as well. But the inherent uncertainty in forecasting means that the process as much as the outcome is useful for all of those involved. And at IOM we've engaged in several forecasting efforts in recent years and one of which you will hear about later today from the global migration data analysis center. But I wanted to offer a snapshot of how forecasting has influenced our work in the Office of the Director General, both big picture and day to day. In 2018, in October 2018, as the new director general took office, he requested that the organization invest in a process to develop a five year strategic vision, setting out IOM's needs in terms of institutional development but also critically priority areas of work. Well, to do this, you also need to understand where IOM has come from and where it hopes to go in the future and IOM is an organization that's experienced enormous change and growth, but also in new demands on the work that it does around the world. So in order to do this well, we needed to understand how the landscape of migration might change over the next decade, what implications that might have then for how we invest in our work around around the world. I don't want to overstate the process we undertook some of the modeling and forecasting that you will hear about today is far more rigorous and far more scientific. But we took advantage of the fact that IOM just happens to have thousands of migration experts around the world engaged in different different aspects of the organization's work and from different perspectives. Some of our experts look at a specific issue in an operational context, understanding what works and what does not. Others look at regional and political change and together a composite of expertise can be built up that is hard to find elsewhere in the world. So we asked IOM experts at all levels of the organization to offer their assessment of how their region or their area of work might change over the next decade, which factors might be the most important and what implications this might have for the organization. And at the same time we convened IOM's then migration research leaders syndicate, made up of some of the world's leading academics and thinkers, and we asked them the same questions. Thankfully, they came up with the same answers. From this, we drew some broad thoughts about the future and what it might mean for IOM. And again, I don't want to overstate the rigor of this work, but it was useful to create a watercolor picture of what the future might be. It's not a prediction, but rather a smudged shape of the decade to come. It included concerns about the impact of climate change. Included concerns about the changing world of work and what that might mean for labor migrants, the use of technology and how that might be used to manage migration and increasing tension between particular regions and countries where inequalities and desires may not match. And from this we drew some strategic priorities. For example, the need to build resilience into our policy and program to think about how to prepare people for the future that will come, including migrants and would be migrants. The need to build agility into our policies for mobility to really think through innovative practice and be able to see how innovative practice can help us adapt to fast-paced change when it occurs and to be able to use that. And here I'd like to emphasize that IOM often doesn't call itself an innovation organization because it's actually a problem-solving organization, but through that problem-solving it finds an enormous amount of innovation in this daily work. And finally, the need to focus on a wide range of partnerships beyond the UN system and beyond member states, including local authorities, regional integration structures, civil society and private sector, and to draw on a broader base of data and evidence garnered from within IOM as well as outside that can inform our work. Well, of course, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Just weeks after the finalization of the strategic vision, the first impacts of the pandemic were being felt, gradually leading to what we've seen this year is an unprecedented slowdown in global mobility and border closures worldwide and broad impacts for people, whether they are on the move or whether they're in one place. I'm personally not disheartened by this. Many of the conclusions we drew from our own mini-forecasting still broadly hold. But more importantly, the tools and competences that we use to develop this vision, the thought process and the conversations are now being used again to consider how the pandemic might shape migration. Our immediate concerns are drastically changed. We are concerned for the several million stranded migrants that are in need of support and systems due to the pandemic. We're assessing with renewed vigor the need to health-proof our systems for mobility to ensure the movement of people can be facilitated safely and securely. Some of our long-term hopes have been recalibrated from the likelihood that the world will achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 in the face of global recession, less unemployment and millions more falling into extreme poverty. But many of our overarching concern, the impact of climate change and environmental degradation, the importance of legal identity and the need to redouble efforts to reduce the vulnerabilities of those caught up in smuggling and trafficking in persons, these all remain. Some issues have become more prominent, access to health and other services, the need for consular protection and visa support, the need to consider alternatives to detention that might reduce the risk of infection. All of these points have additional salience in these current times, which leads me to my main point and what I hope is one of the goals of this meeting. Exact predictions are impossible and, further, dependence on rigid modelling can lead us to ignore growing trends that fall outside of those models and lead us to ignore new sources of data that might be incorporated. And, instead, the value of forecasting is in that constant assessment and reassessment of the future, the skills that are inherent in analyzing the role that different drivers might play in a situation. These are invaluable and they keep all of those working on migration from academics to policymakers to practitioners, alive to the possibilities and uncertainties that may lay ahead. And I have to say, as a migration nerd with a fully paid up membership, it also makes this area of work constantly fascinating, as well as challenging. There is nothing so smart as a fixed assumption. So, listening today to the experts we have gathered discuss future scenarios, different sources of illuminating data and means to develop a composite shifting image of the future is itself an invaluable opportunity. And I look forward to hearing many of these presentations as we go through the day and drawing some key points for our own work over the next several years. And thank you once again for the invitation to speak here today and for gathering such an impressive list of participants. Thank you. Thank you so much, Liz Collette, for these well-chosen and wise words. What a wonderful way to open the day. Thank you also to the two opening speakers, Mr. Wabinger and Mrs. Benbaugh-Pristerer.