SPRING/SUMMER SERIES 2024

Climate Mobilities: Adapting to Shifting Landscapes and Uncertain Futures 

Over the past three decades, warnings of a climate-induced migration crisis have proliferated across global security, environmental, and humanitarian discourses. The International Organization for Migration estimates that up to one billion people will be ‘environmental migrants’ by 2050 (IOM 2024). Whilst acknowledging the growing climate crisis and its material consequences, social science scholars have widely critiqued this monocausal framing between climate change and migration (Sheller 2018, Baldwin 2016, O’Reilly 2020). Specifically, its failure to attend to how such movement remains entangled in social, political, and economic orders, themselves implicated in shifting climates. 

To capture these complexities and unsettled dynamics, scholars Boas et al. suggest a move away from climate migration and towards “climate mobilities,” or the heterogeneous forms of mobility and immobility – of people, ideas, non-human actors, technologies, and risks – that intersect with, are shaped by, and compound climate change (2022). Mobility, they argue, offers a useful conceptual frame that upends fixed notions of territory and place, renews attention to agency, exercised and constrained, amid responses to climate change, and embeds climate-responsive movement in systems and relations of power. 

This issue of Weather Matters seeks to probe how climate mobilities reveal the interconnected and interdependent stakes of survival, adaptation, and flourishing amid accelerating climate change.

Read the full CFP here