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 amid responses to climate change, and embeds climate-responsive movement in systems and relations of power. 

Following this example, 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. In particular, we explore the following themes:

Making Place in Shifting Climates 

Place, Tim Ingold writes, is “delineated by movement” – of people, non-humans, commodities, and ideas – through particular spaces (2009). Changing climates have led to new patterns of mobility and new challenges and possibilities for place-making. For example, rising temperatures have sparked urban investments in shaded green spaces and infrastructures for “active transport” (Böcker et al 2013). Extreme weather events have rendered some communities immobile and others hyper-mobile amid the destruction of homes and vital infrastructures. How do shifting climates urge and shape new places, spatial practices, and modes of mobility? How do people negotiate new spaces and places transformed by and in response to climate? How do infrastructures of mobility (e.g. borders, transportation technologies, communication networks) enable and constrain possibilities for place-making, from the local to the planetary? How does mobility – as reclamation, return, retained presence – function as an act of resistance to global displacement narratives (Farbotko 2022)? 

Climate Risks, Mobility, and Politics  

Dominant discourses around climate risks – to habitability, profit, and sustainability – often present contradictory priorities and futures. For instance, urban solutions to mitigate climate risks that rely on privatization (e.g. green infrastructures and redevelopment projects) often reproduce racial and classed systems of value that inform who is included in calculations of risk and who is abandoned (Yarina 2018). Or, in other words, who gets to stay and who is forced to leave (see also Keenan et al 2018 on climate gentrification)? How does the construction of climate risk shape priorities and capabilities for movement, futurity, and life? How are practices and infrastructures of risk mitigation embedded in social, economic, and political systems of value? How do they dually and differentially structure security and precarity? How do certain climate mobilities (e.g. transnational migration of people, movement of non-human actors) come to be classified and managed as risks?

Movement, Immobility, and Navigating Climate Uncertainty 

Sustaining life under worsening conditions of climate change has generated new landscapes of speculation, fear, and uncertainty across multiple domains. Scientific projections and climate models are ever-changing, weather unpredictability and intensity are amplifying personal anxieties for present and future life, and existing modes of governance are struggling to attend to the compound and intersectional vulnerabilities exacerbated by climate change. How do climate uncertainties challenge and reinforce notions of fixity, stability, and security – of home, land, belonging, ways of knowing, and borders? What strategies, practices, and tools do different actors employ to cope with and manage climate uncertainties? Amid climate devastations of home and homeland, how do individuals and communities (re)establish security and sense of belonging?

Other topics and themes to consider:

  • More-than-human mobilities (altered habitats and migration paths of wildlife and the impacts for human/non-human relations)

  • Shifting densities of place (considering the concept of density as cities, towns, countrysides, and natural areas grow, crowd, shrink, and transform in light of new investments, divestments, displacements, and disturbances) 

  • The fragility of ‘home’ (how the concept of ‘home’ is transformed amidst climate uncertainties and movements)

  • Movement at different spatial and temporal scales (e.g. of spatial: migrations across borders and landscapes, transitory shifts indoors and outdoors; e.g. of temporal: daily, seasonal, and longer-term mobilities)

  • Ideas of shelter, exposure, and justice amongst vulnerable populations (justice including reclaiming capabilities for movement and rights to stay and dwell in place)