Collection

Climate Mobilities and Mobility Justice

Submission status
Closed

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2019), globally more than 21 million people were displaced annually between 2008 and 2018 due to weather-related hazards, within and across borders. While these displacements cannot be fully attributed to climatic changes, it is widely acknowledged that climate change is a compounding factor among the social, economic and environmental drivers of displacement and migration, with both direct and indirect pathways (Wiegel et al. 2019; Nicholls et al. 2020). The World Bank estimates that, by 2050, climate change could force more than 143 million people to move within their countries in three major world regions, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America (Rigaud et al. 2018). Transnational climate migration is also expected to increase as sea-level rise is threatening the very existence of low-lying islands and atoll countries in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that between 31 and 69 million coastal and island livelihoods are at risk, even under an optimistic 1.5 °C scenario (Mechler et al. 2020). There are fears that large-scale migration in response to sudden-onset climate-related disasters and slow-onset environmental degradation and sea-level rise will place increased pressure on livelihoods, public health systems, infrastructure, and social services. There are even estimates that climate-forced displacement and migration will unseat conflict as the main driver of mass migration in the coming decades (Hall 2016).

However, scholars have warned against an unreasonably alarmist narrative of impending mass climate migration flows as well as discourses that promote the securitization and pathologization of human mobility (e.g. Baldwin et al. 2019; Bettini 2019; Boas et al. 2019). They point to methodical difficulties of isolating climate change as a driver of migration, call for more attention to the complex linkages between a changing climate and various forms of mobility, including temporary and small-scale movements, and highlight the political agency and struggles of those on the move. Indeed, rather than simply escaping from known climate-related hazards, ‘climate migrants’ may move to areas where they face new types of climatic and non-climatic risks (e.g. Neef et al. 2018). There is a growing understanding that climate-associated reasons for migration interact with environmental, social, infra-structural, economic, and cultural contexts as well as intersecting dimensions of inequality, such as gender, ethnicity, and race, all of which produce diverse populations that either embark on potentially uncertain migration trajectories or are unable or unwilling to migrate (e.g. Adger et al. 2015; Nicholls et al. 2020). Recent scholarship has pointed to the importance of mobility justice issues (Sheller 2018) that are crucial to comprehending climate change impacts in conjunction with uneven im/mobilities as a result of entrenched spatial and historic injustices (e.g. Cook & Butz 2019; Wiegel et al. 2019; Farbotko & McMichael 2019).

Our topical collection aims to contribute to these evolving debates by inviting work on new conceptual frameworks and empirical studies on climate im/mobilities from a variety of disciplines, including human geography, development studies, psychology, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, public policy, population health, architecture, economics, and gender studies. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine the non-linear complexity of climate mobilities and those that break new ground in exploring ethical questions of mobility justice in the context of accelerating climatic changes. We also welcome manuscripts that explore the psychosocial, health and cultural implications of climate mobilities, even when they involve processes of voluntary migration and planned relocation. The topical collection will pay particular attention to regional diversity of contributions.

Editors

  • Andreas Neef Andreas Neef , 

    Andreas Neef

    Development Studies, School of Social Sciences, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

  • Craig Hutton Craig Hutton , 

    Craig Hutton

    University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

  • Bukola Salami Bukola Salami  &

    Bukola Salami

    University of Alberta, Edmonton Clinic Health Academy, Edmonton, AB, USA

  • Petra Tschakert Petra Tschakert

    Petra Tschakert

    School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia

Articles (7 in this collection)