About 3MIP
3MIP is a community of climate-migration modelers who agree to apply their approaches to a shared benchmark case and synthesize the results. The first benchmark case is coastal Bangladesh. The first public synthesis takes place at iEMSs 2026 in Dublin.
How 3MIP started
3MIP grew out of a workshop at Princeton's Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE) on September 25–27, 2024, organized by Nic Choquette-Levy (Penn State) and Fabien Cottier (Geneva). More than thirty researchers from three continents agreed that climate-migration modeling needed what crop modeling and cross-sectoral impacts modeling already had: a coordinated intercomparison.
The workshop's funding came from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Center at Columbia, the Carolee Bol and Scott Rosenberg '95 C-PREE Fund at Princeton, Cornell's Department of Global Development, and the United Nations Global Centre for Climate Mobility.
AgMIP, ISIMIP, and 3MIP
3MIP is modeled on two long-running model intercomparison projects: AgMIP (Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project), launched in 2010, and ISIMIP (Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project), coordinated from PIK Potsdam since 2012. Both have produced hundreds of papers, contributed to IPCC assessments, and demonstrated that diverse modeling communities can converge on shared protocols without surrendering methodological autonomy.
3MIP applies that pattern to climate-migration modeling. The first phase holds inputs constant — a curated, openly licensed dataset for coastal Bangladesh — and lets participating teams choose their own research questions, model architectures, and output variables. Future phases may move toward harmonized outputs as the community converges.
Governance
Leadership
Three co-leads coordinate the project: Andrew Bell (Cornell), Kelsea Best (Ohio State), and Lars Tierolf (VU Amsterdam). They make day-to-day decisions about protocol, communication, and scheduling.
Advisory committee
A 14-member advisory committee reviews protocol changes, advises on case selection, and provides senior methodological perspective. Members are listed on the Team page.
Project management
Day-to-day coordination is handled by Mario Keputa (Cornell).
What 3MIP is and is not
3MIP is
- A coordinating layer for climate-migration modeling teams
- A curator of openly licensed input datasets for benchmark cases
- A synthesizer of model outputs across diverse architectures
- A venue for publishing intercomparison findings in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings
3MIP is not
- A single-model forecasting service
- A policy advocacy organization
- A funding body
- A clearinghouse for individual modelers' research outputs (those remain with their authors)
Funding
3MIP's founding workshop in September 2024 was funded by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Center (Columbia), the Carolee Bol and Scott Rosenberg '95 C-PREE Fund (Princeton), the Department of Global Development (Cornell), and the United Nations Global Centre for Climate Mobility.
Operating-phase funding for 2025–2027 has not been publicly announced. The leadership team is preparing additional proposals, including an application to the U.S. National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network program [VERIFY current status].