ECMN26 Programme

Research on environment-related (im)mobilities increasingly confronts scholars with spatially dispersed, temporally uneven and politically contested processes. Environmental transformations shape mobility and immobility through slow-onset degradation, extreme events, infrastructural change and shifting conditions of habitability. Capturing these dynamics poses methodological challenges that exceed single disciplinary traditions.

This panel presents a critical discussion of an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary mixed-methodology approach for studying environmental and climate-related (im)mobilities. Bringing researchers from the social sciences, environmental sciences, and technical fields, the panel foregrounds methodological encounters: how different ways of knowing environmental change, mobility, and immobility are combined, negotiated, or come into tension in empirical research. By emphasising methodological integration, the panel advances empirical strategies linking individual and community-level experiences with broader environmental dynamics, infrastructural transformations and policy-relevant datasets.
The panel highlights interdisciplinary collaboration as a methodological practice. It examines how collaborations between social scientists, environmental researchers and technical experts enable new forms of evidence, while also posing challenges of data integration, scale-matching and analytical coherence. The panel fosters methodological exchange on how mixed-methods and interdisciplinary approaches can strengthen empirical research and enhance analytical capacity in environmental and climate mobilities studies.

Speakers:
1: Magdalena Chułek: Everyday (Im)Mobilities under Environmental Constraints: Methodological Reflections from Informal Settlements
2: Karlina Sobczak-Szelc: Integrating Social and Geo-Environmental Methods in Research on Environmental (Im)Mobility, (Mal)Coping, and Adaptation
3: Tuba Brican: Computational Methods in Interdisciplinary Climate (Im)Mobilities Research: Bridging Data, Models, and Lived Realities
4: Coline Garcia, Marion Borderon: Environmental (Im)Mobilities across space and time: Evidence from a dynamic spatial modelling approach in Eastern Ethiopia
5: Khizer Zakir: Environmental Data Cubes and Geons as Integrative Tools for Climate (Im)Mobilities Research in the Sahel Region

Climate change disproportionately threatens the lifeways of mobile and Indigenous communities, from pastoralists to fishery-dependent peoples. While mobility is increasingly recognized as a form of climate adaptation, the intangible cultural heritage that animates these movements—the knowledge systems, social practices, spiritual beliefs, and relational identities tied to land and sea—remains a critically underexplored dimension of adaptive capacity and risk.

This panel seeks to examine the dynamic intersection of cultural heritage, mobility, and climate adaptation. We aim to move beyond frameworks that view heritage solely as a loss or a static asset, exploring instead how living, mobile heritage functions as a source of resilience, a guide for decision-making, and a site of contestation in a changing climate. We ask: How do nomadic, pastoral, maritime, and other mobile cultures embed climate wisdom within their heritage practices? How is this heritage mobilized, transformed, or eroded under climatic and socio-political pressures? And how can transdisciplinary approaches that bridge climate sciences, social sciences, and Indigenous knowledges generate more inclusive and equitable adaptation pathways?

Presentations will include insights from fishery and pastoralist communities from Senegal, Ethiopia and Thailand.

Presentations:
Mobile Livelihoods in Change Climates: Phenomenological Accounts of Mobile-Oriented Professionals – Dr. Nuhu Ismail, Wageningen University, Netherlands; Aliou Sall, Credetip, Senegal

Pastoral mobility and Africa’s Great Green Wall in Senegal – Dr. Annah Zhu, Wageningen University, Netherlands; Moussa Ka, Gaston Berger University, Senegal; Amadou Ndiaye, Gaston Berger University, Senegal

Re-Enchanting Climate Adaptation: An Analysis of Disrupted Mobilities, Cultural Heritage and Climate Adaptation with the Nyangatom Pastoralists in Southern Ethiopia – Dr. Simon Bunchuay-Peth, University of Vienna, Austria

Intangible Heritage across Constrained Seascapes: Moken Mobility, Immobility, and Climate Adaptation in the Andaman Sea – Dr. Kwanchit Sasiwongsaroj, Mahidol University, Thailand

Rationale
Central Asia is emerging as one of the world’s most critical yet understudied regions at the intersection of environmental change and human mobility. Rapid warming, recurrent droughts, accelerating glacier loss, and widespread land degradation are severely undermining rural livelihoods in a region already characterised by extreme water stress. At the same time, Central Asia is a global migration hotspot, with some of the world’s highest remittance-to-GDP ratios, making mobility a central livelihood strategy. Despite this combination of acute environmental stress and high mobility, Central Asia remains a blind spot in environmental mobilities research. Addressing environment-related mobility in Central Asia is therefore urgent—not only to fill a regional knowledge gap, but to advance debates on how environmental stress translates into differentiated mobility, immobility, and well-being outcomes and to design anticipatory governance responses.

Session Structure
This session responds directly to ECMN26 themes on land- and waterscapes, and inter- and transdisciplinary approaches by bringing together empirically grounded studies from Central Asia. The session examines how environmental stress, including land degradation dynamics, shape (im)mobility in rural Central Asia, with a strong empirical focus on the Kyrgyz Republic and scope for broader regional perspectives. It deliberately combines participatory and qualitative approaches with quantitative analyses linking risk perceptions and extreme weather events to household wealth and mobility outcomes.

i) Introductory impulse talk: Kathleen Hermans: Why Central Asia matters for environmental mobilities research now.

ii) Presentations:
– Kamalbek Karymshakov: The role of remittances in building household resilience against climate change shocks in the Kyrgyz Republic
– Barchynai Kimsanova: Household mobility responses to weather extremes
– Setenay Kizilkaya: Climate risk perceptions and mobility in the rural Kyrgyz Republic: a participatory study from Issyk-kul
– Oysuluv Norboeva: Trapped by degradation: land, immobility and staying populations in Uzbekistan

iii) Joint discussion.

Academic research on climate risks has expanded, revealing the complex ways how communities perceive climate risks and what determinants drive their risk perceptions. Climate risk perceptions can be shaped not only by individual and household characteristics but also by cognitive factors, experiential processing of risk, and socio-cultural influences. However, there is limited evidence on how socio-demographic factors such as gender, age, and education intersect with cognitive, experiential, and socio-cultural dynamics, as well as in-situ adaptation opportunities and livelihoods, to explain how risk perceptions are formed, particularly in rural and mountain contexts. Through participatory focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews in Issyk-Kul Province, Kyrgyzstan—which hosts the world’s second-highest altitude lake recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, relying on climate-sensitive livelihoods—this research employs Q methodology to reveal nuanced viewpoints on how climate risk is conceptualized, which factors influence climate risk perceptions, and how risk perceptions and adaptation responses interact. The Q-method analysis reveals 3 main viewpoints on understanding of climate risks: 1-Place-Based Resilience and Faith Despite Future Climate Concerns, 2- Gendered Vulnerability and Pessimism yet Adaptive Preparedness, 3- Human Agency in Climate Adaptation and Future Opportunities. The findings address the divergent and shared views on climate risks between climate experts and local communities, aiming to reveal the potential discrepancies to guide the development of bottom-up climate adaptation policies that respond to the specific needs of vulnerable mountain communities.

Household resilience to climate risks depends critically on financial access, yet the role of remittances in shaping expenditure responses to climate extremes remains insufficiently explored. This study investigates how remittances influence household expenditure patterns under precipitation extremes in the Kyrgyz Republic, using nationally representative panel household survey data (2019–2023). Exploiting exogenous variation in remittance flows generated by historical migration networks and exchange-rate movements, the analysis identifies a context-dependent buffering role of remittances. Remittances help sustain household expenditure during climate risks, with the strongest protective effects observed among rural and high-altitude communities. However, rural households receiving remittances during excess rainfall episodes reduce their expenditure shares on education and health. The middle-income households capture the strongest remittance-climate buffering effects, while the poorest households appear unable to leverage remittances for meaningful expenditure reallocation—likely reflecting the insufficiency of remittances relative to the scale of climate-induced income losses.

Land degradation is rendering communities increasingly vulnerable and potentially driving rural-to-urban migration, particularly in low and middle-income countries like Uzbekistan, where agriculture is a critical sector. However, households whose main livelihood is ecosystem-based are more likely to intend to stay as a result of exposure to environmental hazards, and staying has emerged as an adaptation option in hazard-prone areas. Staying is also an important variable for assessing the effects of population mobility on land-use and land-management changes, and it warrants further attention. It is essential to examine the farm practices of stayers, as farming is the main driver of land degradation when done poorly. This presentation presents the research plans of my doctoral research, which aims to address this critical knowledge gap by examining the relationship between aspirations and capabilities and actual land-use behavior among smallholder households in rural Uzbekistan Specifically, the research explores: (1) how rural smallholders are managing to stay put in the face of land degradation and (2) analyze how different types of immobility, voluntary versus involuntary, shape land-management choices. By doing so, this project will contribute to more effective climate adaptation and sustainable development strategies, which are urgently needed given the escalating land degradation challenges facing vulnerable populations.

Weather extremes increasingly shape human mobility, yet their effects differ across households and locations. We advance understanding of climate-related mobility by distinguishing among four outcomes: domestic mobility, international mobility, combined domestic-international mobility, and immobility, rather than treating mobility as a simple binary choice. Focusing on Kyrgyzstan, a climate-vulnerable mountainous country in Central Asia, we combine nationally representative household panel data from 2013–2022 with high-resolution climate data. Here we show that weather extremes, both within districts and in neighboring districts, are strongly associated with international mobility and immobility, whereas relationships with domestic and combined domestic-international mobility are weaker. Responses differ substantially across households’ socioeconomic position, with immobility more common among households with lower socioeconomic position and more diverse mobility patterns observed among households with higher socioeconomic position. Our findings suggest that mobility responses to weather extremes in Kyrgyzstan are associated with both geographic context and household socioeconomic position.

This paper uses the Caribbean island of Dominica as a case study to examine how residents’ experiences of (un)inhabitability are shaped by intertwined discursive and material processes of vulnerabilisation. Drawing on 40 interviews with government institutions, international organisations and affected residents, it combines discourse analysis and political ecology to analyse Dominica’s resilience politics and entangled resettlement practices.
According to the Climate Risk Index 2025, Dominica was the most affected country from 1993-2022 and announced its ambition to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation after Hurricane Maria (2017), including plans to resettle residents from “vulnerable” areas. I identify three (un)inhabitability discourses in these resilience aspirations: (1) moving people out of danger, (2) strengthening structural resilience of homes, and (3) providing resilient homes for “vulnerable” citizens. These discourses materialize in different ways. In 2015 nine Special Disaster Areas were declared, with two communities relocated. Some residents resisted evacuation orders and engaged in collective repair practices, influencing government policy. The remaining seven communities now face uncertain resettlement. While some residents remain trapped in “risky terrain”, others have rebuilt their lives through individual or government-led resettlement. The findings indicate that (un)inhabitability governance in Dominica reproduces (neo)colonial patterns of vulnerability, leading to unequal mobility outcomes.

Contemporary debates on extreme heat increasingly frame certain places as ‘uninhabitable’ in the future, projecting mass displacement in ways that reproduce environmentally deterministic narratives. Drawing on ongoing research in Jacobabad, Pakistan, a city with the highest recorded levels of humid heat, we explore how residents have ties to a neighbouring cooler city, Quetta, and have an established movement there over the summer. The city of Jacobabad was established by the colonialist, British Brigadier-General John Jacob, in 1847, who developed irrigation in the area, making a landscape that was previously viewed as ‘uninhabitable’ become ‘habitable’. However, with growing concerns over extreme heat in Jacobabad, similar ‘uninhabitable’ labels re-emerge, yet local responses illustrate a far more complex politics of adaptation, access, and constraint. We show that temporary mobility provides an important, though unevenly accessible, strategy for coping with extreme heat. Familial networks, resources, and historical connections shape who can move and under what conditions. We situate heat-related mobility within colonial land-making, contemporary inequalities, and differentiated livelihood possibilities to avoid both technocratic optimism about mobility as an adaptive fix and alarmist predictions of inevitable permanent displacement. Instead, we argue for practical appreciations of how mobility is used to manage heat and its limits.

Managed retreat, the planned relocation of people, assets, and infrastructure away from flood-prone areas, is increasingly discussed as part of climate change adaptation, yet evidence from European contexts remains scattered across languages and reporting formats. This study presents a synthesis of European managed retreat practices related to coastal, riverine, and pluvial flooding.

Drawing on a multilingual review of academic literature, grey literature, official documents, and media sources, we compile a dataset of 44 implemented or planned managed retreat cases across 11 European countries, spanning the period from 1859 to the present. Cases range from the relocation of individual buildings and infrastructure to programs affecting more than 1,500 households. To enable comparison across contexts, cases are assessed using a qualitative evidence index and analyzed across five dimensions: compensation, timing, community engagement, governance&leadership, and post-retreat land use.

The analysis indicates that managed retreat has occurred in a wider range of European contexts than captured in academic syntheses, while initiatives remain largely small-scale and reactive to flood events. Substantial variation is observed across cases in compensation arrangements, forms of engagement, governance structures, timing, and post-retreat land use. These patterns provide comparative insight into how managed retreat is implemented across European flood risk contexts.

Fuego Patagonia (FP)—the extreme southern region of South America (47°–56° S)—was never conquered; it was erased and reinvented. For over 13,000 years, nomadic Indigenous peoples—the Selk’nam, Aonikenk, Kawésqar, Haush, and Yagán—thrived in one of Earth’s harshest environments, sustaining a dynamic equilibrium with their land. This balance collapsed in the late 19th century, as transnational extractivism accelerated the Anthropocene, bypassing gradual colonial conquest. Within decades, industrial demand for meat, wool, oil, and hides dismantled millennia-old ways of life, replacing them with a resource-driven model that scarred ecosystems and silenced cultures. Abandoned ranches, degraded peatlands, invasive species, and ghost towns endure as testimony to this violence.

The presentation examines the radical, unstudied shift in Fuego Patagonia’s habitability, revealing how capitalist expansion politicized the environment, commodified nature, and erased resistant ways of life—not as a passive change, but as an act of imposition. By redefining habitability through resource-driven logic, this transformation raises urgent global questions: Who benefits, and who pays the price when new forms of habitation are enforced? It also invites critical reflection on the paradoxes of habitability—who defines it, who is displaced by it, and how marginalized practices, such as nomadism, might inspire more equitable futures.

This paper aims to contribute to ongoing debates on the climate–migration nexus by foregrounding immobility through a case study of fisherfolk in Dhanushkodi, located at the southern tip of India. Dhanushkodi has been officially declared uninhabitable since 1964, following a lethal cyclone that obliterated the region. However, the ensuing state-led relocation failed to offer durable solutions, including the provision of land titles and livelihood restoration, compelling community members to return to Dhanushkodi. Soon after, the government withdrew from the area, and successive governments continued this approach, institutionalising long-term neglect and marginalisation and subjecting the community to decades of under-service and chronic impoverishment. Sixty years on, approximately 300 fisherfolk families continue to live in Dhanushkodi, facing recurrent climatic risks such as cyclones, adopting a dual household strategy (with one household in the relocated area), and pursuing prolonged legal battles for land titles and fundamental rights. The persistent immobility of Dhanushkodi fisherfolk raises critical questions about state-declared uninhabitability, failed relocation, and the politics of staying. Drawing on insights from a pilot study conducted as part of ongoing PhD research, this study highlights the complex dynamics of (im)mobility, including place attachment, structural constraints and state (in)action in shaping people’s mobility decisions.

Early Warning Systems (EWSs) are critical to disaster risk reduction, particularly in urban settings where climate-induced extreme weather events and flooding can rapidly disrupt mobility, constrain access to essential services, and heighten risk. Yet, most EWSs continue to be designed through top-down, technocratic approaches that inadequately account for the differential mobility capacities and lived experiences of diverse urban residents. Warning communication is often unidirectional, limiting early action and undermining equitable evacuation and response, especially for vulnerable groups such as the elderly, people with limited mobility, and informal settlement dwellers.

This session explores how participatory, non-conventional methods—specifically Living Labs and serious games—can support more inclusive, mobility-sensitive disaster communication and EWS design. While conventional methods like focus group discussions and stakeholder meetings provide valuable insights, they seldom enable communities to meaningfully influence system design or reflect on real-time decision-making under uncertainty. In contrast, Living Labs create space for co-creation and experimentation, while serious games allow participants to engage with simulated (flood) scenarios that foreground mobility constraints, communication gaps, and adaptive decision-making.

This session draws on insights from LODESTAR, an India–Netherlands research collaborative on water-related disaster management that highlights how urban mobility, evacuation behaviour, and inclusive communication intersect during floods. By centring community experiences and embodied knowledge, the project demonstrates how climate mobilities are shaped not only by hazards, but also by governance choices, infrastructural design, and communication practices.

The session will have an interactive two-part format. In the first half, participants will engage in a serious game simulating an urban flood; collectively reflecting on mobility needs, evacuation responses, communication gaps, and expectations from an EWS. The second half will involve a panel-style plenary discussion, inviting participants to reflect on the first half and discuss other participatory and creative methods that support inclusive disaster communication, evacuation planning, and mobility-aware risk reduction.

This workshop session, with minimal presentation, examines the scientific and political dimensions of climate (im)mobility research and governance in sub-Saharan Africa beyond dominant crisis, security, and displacement narratives. In line with the ECMN 2026 emphasis on politics, inter- and trans-disciplinarity, land and waterscapes, it foregrounds how climate mobilities are produced, governed, and contested across temporal change, cultural meaning, media representation, and shifting policy regimes.

Participants will consider who benefits and who is marginalized by prevailing research agendas, discourses, and interventions, with attention to intersectionality across gender, age, and class, colonial legacies, and relations with non-human actors. The session aims to challenge sedentary bias by giving equal analytical weight to mobility, immobility, and forced staying, and by recognizing informal, customary, and community-based governance as central to climate adaptation rather than peripheral.

Activities include participatory mapping in which groups co-create “mobility to immobility landscapes” from sub-Saharan African case studies, visually tracing climate impacts, actors, borders, and everyday practices across land and water. This is paired with a storyline exchange where researchers, practitioners, and, where possible, community partners share brief narratives of lived climate (im)mobility, followed by reflection on whose voices are amplified or silenced in policy and media. A world cafe will rotate participants across thematic tables, such as gendered (im)mobility, sovereignty and borders, non-human relations, and decolonial methods, to enable cross-disciplinary dialogue and rapid synthesis.

The session concludes with a co-design exercise in which groups sketch shared research and policy agendas, producing collective principles and priority questions for ECMN.

While droughts are increasingly linked to human mobility, the social and safety-related pathways – particularly crime – remain underexplored. Using Latin America as a case study, this paper employs a mediation analysis to investigate whether droughts indirectly influence intentions to migrate abroad due to violence levels, with a focus on gender differences. The analysis combines individual-level data from the Latinobarómetro survey with the Standard Precipitation and Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) as a measure of drought. Structural equation modelling and fixed-effects regressions reveal that drought periods are associated with increased exposure to crime, which in turn encourages people to move abroad. The results also highlight significant gender differences. Although women are generally less likely to migrate, exposure to crime strongly increases their mobility intentions. Furthermore, the indirect impact of droughts via violence varies across countries, reflecting differences in socioeconomic and individual conditions. Overall, the findings underscore the role of climate change as a threat multiplier, highlighting how environmental stressors intersect with social vulnerabilities—especially for women—shaping migration decisions and raising important questions for policy and governance in Latin America.

The complex relationship between gender, immobility, and climate change is increasingly recognized as central to understanding differential vulnerabilities in environmentally fragile regions. This paper examines immobility not as a static condition, but as a dynamic state shaped by social, economic, and environmental thresholds, which is strongly influenced by mobility decision making capacity. In deltaic regions, where populations are extremely exposed to floods, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion, gendered norms intersect with structural inequalities to constrain adaptive capacities. Using data from 691 individuals in the Volta Delta of Ghana, we examined the gendered effect of climate risk thresholds on immobility by intersecting the role of mobility decision making capacity. We found that women have low mobility decision-making capacity compared to men, limiting both their mobility options and resilience in the face of environmental stress. Climate-induced thresholds, such as flood, coastal erosion and sea-level rise transforms immobility into migration, but the capacity to move remains unevenly distributed along gender lines. This paper highlights the importance of integrating social differentiation into climate adaptation and mobility policies.

Migration is a common adaptation to climate change impacts – with populations moving away from hazardous areas, but facing new vulnerabilities in destinations throughout diverse geographical and political contexts of South Asia. The effectiveness of migration as an adaptation to climate change has yet to be established for individuals or for origin and destination communities. The urgency of migration as an adaptation strategy is exacerbated by trends in water resources and cryosphere, monsoon variability, coastal change, and incidence of extreme heat across South Asia. We suggest that for migration to be enabled as a successful strategy requires agreed evaluative metrics and principles for policies and interventions. Here we document the scale and scope of the migration as an adaptation challenge for South Asia. Using a novel set of evaluative metrics, we show that migration leads to outcomes of amended precarity, adaptive capacity and well-being for people and places. We propose four key principles: to create enabling conditions for migration; support adaptation in place, make destinations safe for new migrant populations; and make planned relocations fair and inclusive for necessary movements. We document interventions that meet these principles and demonstrate the general lessons for adaptation everywhere.

As climate change intensifies and conflicts persist across many regions, millions of people face overlapping crises. The concurrence of harmful events can amplify their impacts on affected populations, with important consequences for mobility. In this study, we use georeferenced Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from Africa to measure short-term mobility, which we operationalize as the absenteeism of household members within the past 12 months. We combine these data with information on the occurrence of climatic hazards and various types of conflict in respondents’ regions of residence, derived from the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Using comprehensive fixed-effects models, we find that droughts and floods are associated with increased household mobility. However, these effects are suppressed during periods of conflict, when households appear to reduce mobility, likely reflecting both a desire to remain close to family members and constrained opportunities for movement. The influence of conflict on mobility is particularly strong in areas where violence has recently resumed or remains pervasive. Our findings highlight the importance of considering compound and context-specific interactions between environmental stress and conflict when analyzing mobility responses and in designing targeted policies that address the intertwined nature of multiple risks.

This conceptual review considers what is currently known about climate-related (im)mobilities and how they affect children—both children who move in the context of extreme weather events and slow-onset environmental change, and children who remain when parents migrate. Bringing together research on climate mobilities, childhood, education, and wellbeing, the paper examines how mobility is discussed as one household strategy for managing risk and uncertainty, while also recognizing the disruptions it can produce for children’s everyday lives.

The review focuses on three recurring pathways through which climate migration is linked to conflict and child outcomes: (1) material conditions (income, housing stability, health and nutrition), (2) caregiving and protection (family separation, shifting household roles, psychosocial stress, protection risks), and (3) institutional inclusion (school access and continuity, documentation and eligibility barriers, language and discrimination). It also considers how receiving contexts—and urban areas in the Global South specifically—respond to climate-related mobility through schooling systems, service provision, and social protection, and how policy categories and politics (e.g., “migrant,” “displaced,” “refugee”) shape children’s access to support. The paper concludes by identifying implications for child-centered climate adaptation: strengthening continuity of education, supporting caregivers, and embedding child protection across the mobility cycle—before movement, during transit, and in settlement.

Bangladesh is prone to environmental extremes, which are exacerbated by climate change. Environmental extremes such as cyclones have caused infrastructural damage and the loss of many lives. However, despite climatic risks, the population of southwest coastal Bangladesh continues to live in their villages. Considering the damage the previous cyclones have brought to lives and amenities; the immobility of the population indicates the presence of other factors influencing their migration decision. This study aims to assess place belongingness and socio-demographic determinants of non-migration.

Interview data on primary non-migration motivation is used to examine place belongingness, followed by a regression analysis on the socio-demographic determinants of non-migration.
Place of birth is found to be the most important primary non-migration motivation whereas economic and cultural factors are least important. The binary regression results show that age, duration of stay, and life satisfaction are statistically significant. Thus, the non-migration response of the population to an environmental disaster is attributed to place belongingness and the sociodemographic characteristics of the population. In conclusion, the findings of this paper are useful because understanding the socio-demographic characteristics and place belongingness of the population facing climate risks is crucial to devising a working adaptation strategy that matches local needs.

Migration is a driver of social, economic, and environmental transformation for individuals, households, and communities at both origins and destinations. Over the past two decades, migration scholarship has focused largely on migrants’ contributions to global labour supply, demographic change in low-fertility contexts, and, more recently, sustainable practices and their development implications. However, limited attention has been paid to migrants’ livelihood activities and how these shape sustainability practices. There is also scant evidence on how differentiated livelihood strategies among internal and international migrants influence sustainable practices.

This study examines the relationship between migrants’ livelihood activities, neighbourhood contexts, and sustainability practices using data gathered from 1163 individuals from the Misty Project in Accra, Ghana. We argue that sustainability practices are shaped less by migrant status per se and more by the interaction between individuals’ economic activities and the social and environmental characteristics of their destination neighbourhoods. The results show that as migrants adapt to new social norms and economic opportunities, livelihood choices and local contextual influences jointly condition sustainable practices. By shifting the analytical focus from migration status to livelihood–neighbourhood interactions, this study offers a nuanced understanding of migrant sustainability practices and contributes to broader debates on migration, adaptation, and sustainable development.

This study explores reintegration of return migrant workers and community resilience in climate-vulnerable regions of Bangladesh, examining whether returnees can sustainably reintegrate or are compelled to re-migrate due to persistent climate risks and weak local adaptive capacity. While return migration is often viewed as a terminal stage, evidence shows that reintegration outcomes in climate-exposed areas depend heavily on the resilience of communities. The study asks whether strong community resilience facilitates reintegration or whether inadequate resilience turns return migration into a temporary phase, prompting relocation to safer areas. In rural Bangladesh where recurrent flooding, erosion, and livelihood instability are structural constraints, returnees’ outcomes vary with collective livelihood systems, social networks, institutional support, and local adaptive strategies. Reintegration is conceptualized as a community-embedded process shaped by social capital, collective enterprises, risk-sharing mechanisms, and institutional inclusiveness. In resilient communities, returnees can transform skills, savings, and experience into locally grounded livelihoods, reinforcing adaptive capacity. In weakly resilient communities, fragmented institutions and limited livelihood options often drive secondary migration. Using a predominantly qualitative approach supplemented with limited quantitative data, the study finds that areas with community-based resource management show lower migration tendencies and higher reintegration success, highlighting resilience-enhancing structures as critical for sustainable return migration.

This paper provides a contextualised analysis of (im)mobilities between Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, examining how Burkinabé adapt to climate, land and security uncertainties in the Sahel. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in northern Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, it is evident that the trajectories studied, which are often part of a continuum of long-standing movements, are being reconfigured to reflect the diverse forms and temporalities that movement can take.

Drawing on the concept of “translocality” (Greiner & Sakdapolrak, 2013), the paper examines how Burkinabe households organise their lives across several locations simultaneously by re-territorialising their activities. For instance, livestock farming has been relocated from rural to urban areas due to security concerns, with home agriculture being financed by urban trade in Côte d’Ivoire or Ghana. These practices reflect a pragmatic conception of adaptation (or adjustment?), demonstrating the capacity to sustain and conceptualise viable futures despite unstable contexts (Appadurai, 2014).

In this sense, the paper challenges the conventional binary categories employed in migration studies (e.g. migrant/non-migrant, mobile/immobile, origin/destination) and the implicit territorial frameworks of public policies.

The ECMN workstream on “Climate, Human (Im)Mobility, and Health” covers all connections between the three elements of the nexus. During our first in-person session at ECMN-2025, we established the scope and aims of the workstream. Since then, we have met twice and are currently collaborating on writing a commentary that addresses the gaps in climate, human (im)mobility, and health research. We would like to hold a second in-person session at ECMN-2026 to reconnect with the workstream members in person and to integrate the newly joined participants actively. The session will provide an opportunity to reflect on progress to date, align expectations, and strengthen collaboration across disciplinary and professional boundaries. Similar to the last in-person meeting, we aim to collectively identify and agree on one concrete next effort that we, as a workstream, will pursue in 2026. Potential outputs that have been mentioned during our online conversations are: developing a training program for researchers/policymakers, aiming to integrate the respective topic into their work, or more creative outputs such as starting a Podcast or organizing events such as a Science Slam in multiple countries, where researchers are asked to present their work in an easy-to-understand manner. The session will combine plenary discussions and small breakout groups. The breakout groups will be used to discuss specific questions and ideas regarding future workstream activities, with outcomes reported back to the plenary. The overarching goal of the session is to achieve a shared understanding of roles, responsibilities, and tentative timelines for the agreed-upon effort.

This workstream, established in 2024, brings together ECMN members interested in the representational politics and narratives of climate mobilities. Our workshop will be in two parts. 

In the first part, we will collectively explore some of the key themes that are coming up in our online sessions. In particular, we want to focus on why simplistic and problematic approaches to climate mobilities persist despite a wealth of work that now challenges them. We will explore the impact that resurgent far-right, authoritarian and aggressively nationalist politics have had on the representation of climate mobilities. The rise of anti-immigrant, racist, Islamophobic and climate-sceptic narratives has surely had an effect on the framing of climate change as it intersects with migration – how has this manifested itself? What space is there for more nuanced approaches? And if there are important counternarratives circulating, who is producing them and what traction do they have?

In the second part of the workshop, we will use a “Collective Sticker Creation” (CSC), a tool of participatory action research which opens spaces for embodied, creative, and collective storytelling (Heiland et al. forthcoming). Building on the discussion of the first part, we will guide participants through the process of creating stickers, an underestimated medium (in academia) that demands imaginative, concise, visual answers  to questions such as “what do we, as climate mobilities researchers and practitioners, want to see in the world?”, “what messages do others need to hear about our research findings?” and “what should climate mobilities ideally look like?” At the end, we will stick/exhibit the results of our work for all to see. 

Climate-related mobilities are increasing in scale and complexity, driven by a convergence of environmental, political, and socio-economic stressors. Rather than a single-cause phenomenon, contemporary climate mobility is embedded within a broader polycrisis characterized by overlapping disruptions to global governance, the erosion of international migration norms, and mounting pressures on institutions operating at multiple scales. For scholars and practitioners in the field, these dynamics have fundamentally reshaped both the objects of study and the conditions under which research, policy engagement, and institutional responses occur.

This workshop brings together perspectives that examine the interconnected impacts of climate mobilities across global, regional, and institutional contexts. The session will explore how governance frameworks are adapting—or failing to adapt—to increasingly complex mobility patterns, how normative protections for displaced populations are being challenged, and how academic, policy, and civil society institutions are responding to these shifts. The meeting with focus on how to better collaborate and support each other’s work, formulating a more specific workplan for the next year, and bringing more attention to these interconnected issues though a co-authored thought piece on Planetary Politics.

Nain island (in North Sulawesi, Indonesia) is surrounded by a fair amount of discarded food wrappings, plastic bottles, bags and other items. Plastic pollution is a hazard as it decreases the quality of water, impacts on the health of corals and fish, and contributes to global warming. This paper critically explores how waste and waste management are understood and enacted in and around islands. Based on years of critical ethnographic research, and through a (in) mobility lens, this paper explores different views of waste, and how the Bajo navigate and resists dominant (state) approaches and framings of waste management. If ideas of waste and waste management are not neutral or universal, then that waste is much more than ‘matter-out-of-place’, and as a way of regulating different (in) mobilities in and around islands. Through storytelling, we unpack the politics of waste management in order to critically understand the accumulation of maritime waste in context. And so we ask: what multiplicity of views exist Bajo spaces? Is waste management biased? How do people resist biased policy and how does waste (and waste management) become a political instrument in the struggles of the Bajo?

This contribution introduces the framework of fire (im)mobilities to rethink climate mobilities through the lens of fire politics. Moving beyond dominant disaster-centered approaches, it conceptualizes fire not as a hazard triggering displacement, but as a political and ecological agent that actively produces differentiated forms of (im)mobility among humans and non-humans.

Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the Cerrado-Amazon transition zone in Brazil, the paper shows how fire circulates through uneven and coexisting governance regimes.
In agribusiness-dominated landscapes, fire is neither uniformly appropriated nor entirely rejected. Rather, it is selectively mobilized or prohibited depending on its alignment with regimes of land control and production. While certain uses of fire are legitimized as tools for territorial management and expansion, others are rendered illegal through fire suppression governance that disproportionately criminalize local burning practices.
These uneven regimes of governance shape not only movement, but also forms of chosen or constrained immobility, affecting everyday (im)mobilities, assemblages’ rhythms and practices of territorial stewardship.
Adopting a pyrocentric perspective, the paper links fire-related (im)mobilities to climate change, land tenure and colonial legacies, extending mobilities analysis beyond the human to multispecies dynamics within contested landscapes.

Oyster restoration is gaining prominence as a strategy to rehabilitate coastal ecologies across the global North. In this restoration context, oysters are valued for their localized reef-building capacities and associated ecosystem services, but in reality, oyster life and death are profoundly shaped by mobility. Local oyster populations are embedded in transoceanic histories of seafood trade, aquaculture expansion, and climate change, which have facilitated the movement of species and associated pathogens, both framed as “alien” biosecurity threats. At the same time, contemporary restoration increasingly relies on transboundary circulation of oysters to enhance disease resistance and survival in warming waters.

This tension raises critical questions about the politics and practice of care. Conceptualizing oyster restoration as a form of care illuminates the biopolitics through which certain species, bodies, and movements are enabled, while others are contained or eliminated. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across interconnected restoration sites in Europe and the United States, we examine (1) how native–alien distinctions produce care practices that securitize oyster and disease mobility, and (2) how this securitization, in turn, constrains restoration success. Tracing these entanglements reveals the values and assumptions shaping decisions about which beings deserve care and what multispecies mobilities are permitted or foreclosed.

This paper aims at creating and proposing a methodological framework for submerged ethnographic research and seeks to unpack the question: How can a submerged methodology contribute to the emerging field of hydrofeminist justice? The underwater realm and its watery surfaces play a crucial role in shaping our collective future on this planet. Yet, invasive anthropogenic practices, such as deep-sea mining and industrial fisheries, pressure life supporting systems and disturb intricate more-than-human entanglements. Moreover, they put pressure on coastal and indigenous communities who have epistemologies regarding the ocean as a caregiver and source of life. Given this, social scientists, post-humanists, and activists have highlighted the importance of developing approaches that centre hydrofeminist justice. This paper thus seeks to address their call by exploring the potential of “submerged methodologies” — approaches that wish to work with, in, and on the water in relation to its inhabitants and communities dependent on it. Drawing upon my own practices of diving and underwater ethnography, as well as interviews with scholars, writers, and activists, I will explore the possibilities and challenges of submerged methodologies in contributing to hydrofeminist justice. In doing so, I aim to contribute a methodological framework for submerged research that not only recognises the importance of watery realms but honours their agency.

The land of Zambales, Philippines, has been profoundly reshaped by disasters and post-disaster interventions. Following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, massive evacuation occurred as lahar sand flowed through river systems and reached the coastline, transforming the landscape into a dynamic sandscape: deeply mobile, deeply political, and unevenly lived.In coastal communities, lahar sand initially created opportunities for land occupation, housing construction, manual sand excavation, and new fishing practices. While some residents were able to settle and adapt, the same sand later became the target of accelerated dredging operations mandated by the state. Framed as river rehabilitation and disaster risk reduction, these interventions primarily serve developmental interests beyond Zambales, including land reclamation in Metro Manila. Through extraction and political decisions, sand once again became mobile.

This paper examines how land transformations shape people’s motility: who is able to move, who is constrained to stay, and who is forced to move again. It shows how erosion, restricted access to fishing grounds, damaged infrastructure, and rising costs reconfigure everyday mobility, livelihoods, and future planning. Using a Feminist Political Ecology framework, the paper contributes to environmental mobilities scholarship by showing how governance regimes mobilize climate risk and environmental protection discourses to legitimize extractive interventions.

Storytelling Format: Participants will gather in a circle, with the textile map laid out as a focal point. This session departs from traditional presentations, instead embracing a storytelling format. Attendees are invited to engage with the map, pointing to specific elements that relate to the links between environment and mobilities, and asking about them. They can also share their own stories, research, or reflections, weaving personal narratives with the map’s visual representations of mobilities and environmental change. The map serves as a catalyst for collective memory and shared understanding.

This workshop uses interactive mapping of sensory and embodied experiences to foreground justice not only as an object of critique but also as a practice that requires reflexivity and accountability. Contemporary climate and environmental mobilities are embedded in intersecting systems of injustice, including racialized borders, gendered vulnerabilities, and economic dispossession; systems that researchers themselves move through, benefit from, and sometimes reproduce. This workshop centers collective (un)learning and critical reflection on our assumptions and roles as scholars, practitioners, and institutional actors in shaping the narratives of climate (im)mobilities.

Moving beyond reflexivity as a purely cognitive exercise, the workshop uses the body and senses as tools for recognising positionality and reflecting on the boundaries researchers cross, cannot cross, or choose not to cross. Our access to research sites, institutions, datasets, and interlocutors; our (in)ability to cross borders; and the perspectives through which we interpret (non)movement are shaped by our own positionalities. 

We invite researchers, practitioners, and community-engaged scholars from different disciplines, and geographies to show up with a willingness to reflect honestly and learn across differences. Together, participants will engage in embodied and sensory recall and contribute to a collective mapping of geographies of knowledge (re)production and extraction, and its implied power dynamics and accountability.

Tourism is one of multiple mobilities responding to environmental and societal challenges in our world today, such as labour and asylum migration or everyday mobility in cities and regions in the Netherlands. Yet, research and societal debates on each of these mobilities occurs in relative isolation, with little discussion on the key commonalities, the differences and the interactions between them. For example, flows of migrants typically make use of the same transportation systems as tourists, but are politically framed in very differently. While the first are seen as fleeing climate extremes, the second are enjoying coolcations in Scandinavia or considered digital nomads in the Mediterranean.

Tourism, including both leisure and business travel, represents a large and complex mobility systems interrelating in many ways with climate change. Particularly through fossil fueled transportation of car mobility, aviation and cruising, accommodation and gastronomy, tourism is a major contributor of global greenhouse gasses, but also responsible for wider societal and environmental impacts intersecting and amplifying the climate crisis. Tourism activities and destinations, particularly those in marine and remote regions, are increasingly experiencing climate-related impacts, such as weather extremes, floods, droughts, or sea level rise. The tourism and travel sector is standing at a critical crossroads facing multiple changes of decarbonization, adaption and transitioning towards a more sustainable and equitable future. These sustainable tourism transitions require change and action at all levels, from governance mechanisms, institutional lock-ins and market structures, to consumer behaviour and cultural imaginaries (Niewiadomski and Brouder, 2024). Yet, scientific, commercial and societal perspectives on the direction and pace of these changes differ increasingly, leading to a politicization of tourism mobilities and its role in sustainability transitions facing the climate crisis.

In this session key experts in the field of tourism and travel present cutting edge research perspectives on the characteristics and interrelations between tourism mobilities and climate change. Next to a number of presentations a large part of the session takes the form of a panel discussion with the audience, involving representatives of the travel sector on the politicization of tourism and tourism, and the sustainability transitions facing this mobility system.

Featured speakers:

• Bas Amelung (WUR): “Climate change and tourism mobilities: emissions, impacts and equity”
• Tim Huiskes (RUG): “Climate adaptation in Northeastern Netherlands’ tourism”
• Martijn Duineveld (WUR): “Mobilities and Climate Obstruction: Normalising and denormalising the geopolitics, fossil fuel, and tourism triangle”
• Cheryl van Adrichem (WUR): “Mobilities and Climate Obstruction: Examples from the Hague’s fossil advertisement ban controversy”
• Ewout Versloot (NBTC): “Climate change and tourism mobilities: A view from the sector”
• Jillian Student (WUR): Transdisciplinary approaches for understanding climate change and tourism mobilities

This presentation argues that green colonialism offers a valuable lens for understanding (im)mobilities as by-products of the socio-political structures underpinning the global green transition. Drawing on a literature review and examples from Latin America, the paper explains the concept’s evolution in political ecology and decolonial thought, and calls for a justice-oriented framework to recognize how climate action itself may reproduce displacement, inequality, and ecological harm. The global shift toward production models with lower greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental goals has increasingly generated a broad spectrum of (im)mobilities—particularly among ethnic minorities and marginalized communities. This paper critically examines these outcomes—often framed as unintended consequences of climate mitigation—through the concept of green colonialism. We illustrate with examples from Latin America (a region particularly affected) how two dynamics associated with green transitions, namely (a) the extractive exploitation of raw materials for green technologies, and (b) the imposition of conservation initiatives shaped by carbon offset markets, result in forced (im)mobilities. Drawing on these examples, we examine how the concept of green colonialism contributes to understanding the geopolitical roots of these dynamics.

Megacities face mounting tensions between development imperatives and climate resilience, particularly affecting marginalized communities in informal settlements. This study examines how residents of informal settlements in Lagos, Nigeria navigate climate impacts while confronting exclusion from formal adaptation planning. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across twenty settlements, this research introduces two key concepts: adaptation infrastructures—socio-technical systems that systematically organize practices, knowledge, and materials to manage climate impacts while fulfilling resource needs—and adaptation livelihoods—economic activities addressing climate needs while providing income. Residents construct sophisticated systems including bridging networks, land stabilization through waste processing, and water distribution serving both settlements and the broader city. However, Lagos State’s vision of becoming “The Next Dubai” creates profound misalignment between formal planning and community capacities. When settlements are demolished under climate protection rhetoric, adaptation infrastructures are dismantled, dispersing residents without their networks and practices. This displacement constitutes maladaptation, increasing vulnerability where formal housing alternatives remain inaccessible. The findings challenge deficit-based vulnerability models and suggest pathways for equitable adaptation that recognizes existing community capacities rather than displacing them through development-oriented interventions.

Studies of climate migration have largely focused on households and communities due to the direct impacts to lives and livelihoods. However, firms are also likely to relocate, with the potential for widespread impacts to cities and communities, and this process is not well understood. Corporate relocation is a critical area of research within climate-related relocation, connected to debates on place-branding, investment geographies, and climate gentrification. In case studies of two states in the Great Lakes region of North America, an ostensible receiving zone, interviews and document analysis concerning economic development and site selection practices reveal that an emerging climate pitch and changing norms of corporate decision-making favor an absence of natural disasters, access to freshwater, and availability of a clean, reliable electric grid. As environmental conditions become more prominent factors in place-marketing and the climate pitch and site selection criteria converge, they are influencing the investment-worthiness of locations. This process is conducive to the emergence of corporate climate havens, or locations that attract investment due to their relative resilience. Understanding this emerging phenomenon and the attendant risks of climate gentrification and displacement are critical to managing prospects for collective decarbonization and resilience as environmental extremes intensify.

Severe droughts during the 1970s and 1980s reduced rainfall across large parts of rural Mali, triggering population movements in search of water and cultivable land, particularly towards the Office du Niger (ON) irrigation zone. These climate-related mobilities were later reinforced by state incentive policies promoting private investment and international partnerships after the 2008 food crisis, aimed at mobilising irrigable land and securing water for agricultural production.

This paper analyses how climate change shapes the mobility of different actors,peasants, pastoralists, private investors and state institutions,towards the Office du Niger in search of land and water. It examines the dynamics emerging at this crossroads, where land access, agro-industrial investment, agribusiness expansion and smallholder farming intersect and compete. Particular attention is paid to land tenure security and sustainability challenges in a context of agricultural transformation.
The findings show that mobility is driven not only by climatic stress but also by social, political and economic factors. For vulnerable communities, mobility operates as an adaptation strategy, while for private investors it represents an opportunity for capital accumulation. These divergent interests often generate land-related conflicts. Addressing the land needs of local populations and mobile actors is essential for promoting equitable agricultural development under climate change.

Climate mobility research has expanded rapidly over the past two decades (Tarun et al., 2025), yet the field continues to grapple with fundamental questions about epistemology, methodology, and the politics of knowledge production (Amelina, 2022; Amelung et al., 2024). Critical concerns persist regarding who produces knowledge, whose experiences are centred, and how methodological choices shape narratives, evidence, and ultimately policy outcomes in climate-induced (im)mobility contexts (Amelina, 2022; Simpson et al., 2024).

As climate mobility becomes increasingly institutionalised within multilateral frameworks, including UNFCCC mechanisms, the Global Compact on Migration, and national adaptation planning processes (Vanhala & Calliari, 2022), there is a growing risk that dominant research paradigms reproduce structural inequalities and reinforce extractive knowledge hierarchies (Amelina, 2022; Amelung et al., 2024). The proliferation of research from the Global North on communities in the Global South raises urgent questions about epistemic justice, representation, and the colonial legacies embedded in contemporary climate research practices (Heras & Gupta, 2025; Schöpf et al., 2025; Sultana, 2025).

Our panel will create a critical reflexive space for examining the politics of knowledge production. The workshop will interrogate how researchers’ positionalities (including race, gender, nationality, institutional affiliation), methodological traditions (quantitative, qualitative, participatory, mixed methods), funding structures, and geopolitical hierarchies fundamentally shape what counts as legitimate evidence, whose voices are amplified or silenced, and how research does or fails to influence policy processes (French et al., 2024). Panel members will discuss:
• Methodological politics and epistemic choices
• Researcher positionality, reflexivity, and power
• Legitimacy, authorship, and global south researchers
• Voice in science policy interface
• Principles for ethical, grounded, impactful research practice
Workshop panel structure
• Opening provocation
• Short reflections from invited contributors
• Small-group reflection circles
• Plenary synthesis
• Co-creation of ideas for “climate mobility research ethics charter” and practice

Research on environmental and climate-related (im)mobilities has expanded rapidly, yet it remains characterized by uneven geographies of knowledge production. Empirical and conceptual work has largely focused on contexts in the Global South, while climate-related mobilities in the Global North are often framed as marginal, future-oriented, or secondary to other adaptation strategies. At the same time, climate impacts (such as sea level rise, drought, heatwaves, flooding, wildfire, landslides and debris flows) are already reshaping livelihoods, attachment to place, accessibility and mobility decisions in the Global North.

This session brings together both empirical insights from ongoing research across Europe, in mountainous areas and coastal and inland environments and conceptual discussions to explore how climate-related risks are perceived, negotiated, and acted upon. We approach (im)mobility as one strategy among others, alongside protection, accommodation, retreat, advancement, and staying put. We examine how local histories, future imaginaries, governance arrangements, and socio-demographic inequalities shape these adaptation pathways. Through this lens, climate (im)mobilities are understood as relational, political, and embedded in place-based cultures and socio-environmental change.

The session begins with a roundtable and is followed by an interactive workshop. First, the roundtable will provide space for participants to present ongoing projects and to discuss why climate (im)mobilities in the Global North remain comparatively understudied, including the conceptual and methodological implications of this imbalance. Second, the workshop will use a structured world café / small-group format to collectively identify high-priority research questions, key sites and regions, methodological approaches, intersections with other fields, and opportunities for collaboration and funding. The session will conclude with a wrap-up synthesizing shared perspectives, co-developing a shared conceptual framing, and outlining future collaborative research directions.

Environmental and climate change increasingly shape patterns of human mobility while exposing the limits of state-centred policy frameworks. Although states remain interest-driven actors, the indiscriminatory impacts of climate and environmental change operate beyond borders, challenging traditional notions of sovereignty, territorial control, and migration governance. This paper examines the political nexus between environment, climate change, and human (im)mobility, asking how state interests are pursued when environmental forces disregard citizenship, borders, and jurisdiction. Drawing on political realism and global governance perspectives, the paper argues that the survival of humanity should be repositioned as a core state interest rather than a secondary humanitarian concern. Climate-related displacement, uninhabitability, and the loss of marine and territorial spaces increasingly demand policy responses that transcend unilateral action. Using a qualitative, exploratory-descriptive design, the study analyses international policy documents, legal instruments, and multilateral agreements to assess how states frame climate mobility within existing governance regimes. The analysis highlights policy tensions between security-oriented, sovereignty-focused approaches and emerging cooperative frameworks involving regional institutions, international organisations, and non-state actors. It identifies gaps in protection, accountability, and coordination that produce uneven outcomes and political winners and losers. The paper concludes by advocating anticipatory and cooperative policy approaches for climate mobility governance.

Alarmist narratives project ‘climate migration’ as a problem to be solved, whether through charity, militarisation, neoliberal ‘resilience’, or legal justice. These share the assumption that migration is pathological and nation-state borders normal. Climate (im)mobilities research demonstrates the empirical shortcomings of such narratives, but its theoretical foundations could be further developed to avoid the co-optation of its findings into the reproduction of borders.

This paper theorises the climate-migration nexus through the concept ‘border imperialism’, which understands the structural-relational processes shaping contemporary migration patterns (borders) as a critical part of the organisation of global capitalism (imperialism). This framework can help us link land, borders, and environmental issues and trace the (im)mobilisation of people alongside the enclosure, accumulation, and exploitation of their resources.

The paper illustrates this by considering migrant workers in the greenhouses of Almería, southern Spain, where the lack of legal migration pathways pushes people into precarious labour within extractive agriculture supplying northern European markets.

The paper suggests that ‘border imperialism’ can re-politicise climate mobilities research by (1) critiquing state-centric assumptions, (2) connecting migration and environmental issues within a shared global history, which may bridge the field’s North-South divide, and (3) charting normative pathways to address (im)mobilities in environmental politics.

This paper conceptualises the relationship between degrowth and human mobility as a basis for emancipatory futures, proposing mobility as a creative socio-ecological practice rather than a problem of scarcity, limits, or control. Drawing on Scheel and Tazzioli’s mobility perspective, it explores how degrowth’s anti-colonial, democratic, and gender-equal foundations can disrupt dominant frameworks that criminalise migration and justify population control, advancing mobility justice centred on agency, creativity, and resistance. Central to the argument is the concept of “open localism,” a spatial practice that refuses the binary between local sustainability and global mobility, envisioning postgrowth futures that span everyday micro-geographies and planetary networks of care and mutual aid. It outlines two interventions for postgrowth mobility: movement as ecological practice of land stewardship and biodiversity enhancement and nomadic degrowth communities that inhabit territories without extractive relations. Challenging the assumption that sustainability requires immobility or border closure, the framework imagines non-linear, regenerative forms of circulation that foster resilience, justice, and ecological flourishing, advancing commons-based approaches to mobility governance that liberate movement from capitalist logics and enable regenerative socio-ecological systems.

The question of how climate change intersects with human migration has most often been answered by projecting present-day migration frameworks into the future. Thereby, today’s unequal socio-ecological relations and constrained geographies of mobility, displacement, and immobilisation are projected into an even direr future. Central to this is the entrenchment of state-centric visions of (im)mobility, and of the biopolitical nexus State-territory-citizenship. This has serious repercussions, e.g. the reification of the climate migrant / refugee as a fixed figure amenable to governmental control (or to be saved), but also serving as harbinger of future “migration crises.”

Drawing on critical migration and border studies, and on the climate mobilities framework, this intervention develops the notion of “climate borderscapes” to facilitate a de- and re-territorialization, loosening future imaginaries of mobility from the deadlock of state-centric and crisis-driven narratives. Gesturing in that direction, this intervention explores the role of cities and urban processes in opening space for alternative articulations of (im)mobility and habitability, climate justice, sanctuary and solidarity. To be sure, cities are not posited as the locus of any given ‘solutions’, but the urban scale is understood as horizon for political contestation, claim-making and experimentation.

The Sahel region, stretching south of the Sahara Desert from Senegal to Eritrea, has experienced significant land degradation in recent decades, with serious consequences for populations whose livelihoods depend largely on agriculture and pastoralism. In response, eleven Sahelian states adopted the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGWI) in 2007, aiming to combat desertification while promoting sustainable development. Senegal has been particularly active in implementing the initiative, notably through the creation of the National Agency for the Great Green Wall (ANGMV) in 2008.

Despite its environmental and social objectives, the implementation of the GGWI in Senegal has been criticised for its essentially top-down approach, which tends to marginalise pastoralists. This research examines how the GGWI functions as a climate mobility regime governing pastoral mobility in Senegal. The analysis draws on literature review, policy analysis and an interview with a researcher familiar with the GGWI implementation in Senegal.

The findings suggest that, in line with other broader development policies, the GGWI in Senegal is being implemented through sedentarization strategies that restrict pastoral mobility and affect pastoralists’ livelihoods. Consequently, presented as an environmental intervention, this initiative also functions as a governance tool for achieving domestic objectives.

As the global community enters a period of ‘polycrisis’, the temporal dimension of human-environment relations has become a critical frontier for research. This session builds on recent calls in climate mobility, notably by Koko Warner (in ECMN 2025 in Bonn), to move beyond static snapshots of risk and instead examine how time (as memory, duration, and urgency) shapes human negotiation of environmental transformation. While adaptation, as a snapshot of time, is widely studied, the temporal transformation of human responses remains under-theorized. This session explores how people navigate through everyday negotiations of change (including ‘slow-onset’ vs. ‘rapid-onset’ hazards) and how temporality dictates the choice between adaptation, migration, or staying.

We invite contributions that offer: (i). Methodological innovations for capturing temporal depth (e.g., longitudinal studies, life-history mapping, policy mapping, geospatial analysis, and mixed method approaches), (ii). Empirical studies on tracing time-scape on adaptation, resilience, and everyday risk negotiation, and (iii). Analyses of temporal mismatch, specifically the friction between the speed of political decision-making and the speed of ecological change or recovery.
This session is envisioned as a thematic panel consisting of 4-5 papers. As the session organizer, I will provide an opening framing paper based on my research on intergenerational (im)mobility in the Bengal Delta. We welcome contributors from across geography, development studies, and spatial planning who address historical, intergenerational, or longitudinal processes. This session is eager to collaborate with the scientific community in ECMN 26 to curate a diverse panel dedicated to making the ‘invisible’ temporal drivers of mobility visible.

With male out-migration from rural India increasing over the decades and migration becoming increasingly selective, a left-behind and relatively immobile population has emerged, largely consisting of women, children, and the elderly. Middle-aged women face significant psychological and physical pressures as they assume responsibility for household management and caregiving while navigating environmental precarity. This paper examines how women who remain in the Indian Sundarbans reorganise their daily lives and time-use practices in response to male out-migration and climate stress. The Sundarbans present a challenging landscape and waterscape characterised by cyclones, flooding, and saltwater intrusion. In this context, immobile women adapt through everyday adjustments in time spent on domestic work, care, income-generating activities, and rest. Using unit-level data from India’s National Time Use Survey, this study analyses women’s time allocation across seasons to assess how environmental variability and disaster risk shape daily work patterns, complemented by qualitative field observations. The findings show that women’s daily routines have become more intense and disrupted. Environmental stress increases unpaid care work and makes livelihood activities unstable. While these adaptations demonstrate coping capacity, they also reveal uneven and often overlooked adaptation costs in migration and policy debates.

Scientific evidence has overwhelmingly demonstrated that ongoing climate change and its impacts exacerbate stress on both human communities and natural ecosystems. This raises critical questions about adaptation needs and limits, the (unin)habitability of places, and the role of human mobilities. This research introduces the concept of “entangled translocal resilience” to analyze the interconnectedness of these phenomena as entanglements of actors, spaces, and time. Empirically, the study focuses on two Costa Rican communities and territories that have seemingly reached the limits of climate adaptation, where various forms of mobility can be observed and where habitability is at risk or uninhabitability has already been declared. Here, local populations continue to navigate complex situations and negotiations, revealing a fundamental question: What happens to the lives of local populations when home becomes uninhabitable in the context of environmental and climate change? This research adopts a translocal and qualitative approach, employing methods such as in-depth interviews, photo-elicitation, and participatory mapping. The resulting insights will contribute to ongoing discussions regarding the contested nature of habitability and adaptation limits, and the role of mobilities in contexts of environmental and climate change.

Intensifying environmental stressors are disrupting livelihoods dependent on natural resources in the South Asian delta. While state decision-making mediates adaptation, research often lacks the temporal depth to understand long-term transformation. Moving beyond static lenses, this study investigates the longitudinal role of governance in mediating environmental impacts across generations. Using 52 life-history interviews across ten regions in West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh, the study traces how evolving environmental conditions and governance mechanisms interact to shape adaptation strategies.

Findings reveal a generational shift from nature-based livelihoods to precarious labor migration, primarily driven by a lack of restorative governance. Conversely, where governance prioritized structural interventions to restore natural resources, revived ecosystems supported return migration and local self-sufficiency. The study identifies three distinct adaptation pathways—Stability, Restoration, and Dependency pathways—demonstrating that the delta’s future depends on the specific nature of governance responses. Theoretically, this research advances Social-Ecological Systems (SES) theory by transitioning the focus from static entities to dynamic, multi-generational processes. Finally, it proposes region-specific interventions to revive the ‘capability to stay’ in climate-vulnerable deltas.

As environmental change further intensifies, growing attention has been paid to its relationship with human (im)mobility. Yet, while environmental factors are increasingly recognized as drivers of mobility, far less is known about how different types of environmental change affect mobility trajectories and integration at destination. This research addresses precisely this gap by examining how mobility driven by slow-onset versus sudden-onset environmental events shapes social and economic integration, with particular attention to situations of urban informality.

This interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach combines econometric analysis of national survey data with qualitative fieldwork (i.e. semi-structured interviews) conducted in the cities of La Paz and El Alto. By capturing both structural patterns and lived experiences, this design allows for a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of distinct types of voluntary and forced mobility in the context of environmental change. Preliminary findings point to divergent mobility and integration pathways. While migrants affected by slow-onset events show stronger signs of social adaptation, those displaced by sudden-onset events face heightened vulnerability and reliance on government support. This evidence calls for adaptation and resilience policies that are better aligned with the realities of varied (im)mobility and integration trajectories in the face of continuing environmental change.

Since the mid 1990s, work at the interface of human mobility, environment and climate change has been marked by debates over terminology that have shaped governance responses, institutional priorities and whose mobility (or immobility) counts as a policy concern. From early alarmist references to “environmental refugees” and “floods of refugees” to later umbrella notions such as “human mobility” and “disaster displacement,” this paper examines how shifts in language operate as political practices that determine which issues gain visibility, which institutions claim authority, and who is rendered (in)visible in policy and practice.

The paper traces key moments: early environmental refugee debates; the strategic adoption of “human mobility” in the 2010 Cancun agreement; the consolidation of “disaster displacement” through the Nansen Initiative and the Platform on Disaster Displacement; the Global Compacts for Refugees and Migration, UNFCCC developments, including the WIM and its Task Force on Displacement. It also considers how the Sendai Framework, with its multiple mobility related hooks, shapes openings for implementation at national level.The paper identifies how terminological choices affect problem framing, funding and institutional responsibility, and argues that, as climate impacts accelerate and policy windows narrow, disputes over “correct” terminology risk delaying protection and other action.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnography within the GenderedClimateMig project in Casablanca (Morocco), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), and MexicoCity–Tapachula (Mexico), this paper examines how racialization, climate change, and migration regimes co-produce differentiated (im)mobilities. Evidence includes interviews, focus groups, and participant observation in shelters and migrant-dense neighborhoods. The core claim is that climate is not an isolated driver of migration but a racialized technology of governance. Under externalization, racialized sorting prolongs waiting and precarious transit, deepening environmental exposure and psycho-emotional distress. Long-term shifts (heat, rainfall variability, sea-level rise, drought) and rapid-onset extremes (floods, hurricanes) interact with infrastructural breakdown and corridor violence, while racialization shapes who can move, who must wait, and who is exposed. Racialization exceeds phenotype, shaping access to work, housing, and legal protection through anti-Blackness, culturalist racisms, and nationalized stigma. In Mexico, anti-Blackness targets Haitian/Cuban communities; Central American migrants face culturalist racialization via accent, nationality, and classed judgments. In Kuala Lumpur, Bangladeshi, Indonesian, Myanmar, and Filipino migrants navigate postcolonial hierarchies of “deservingness.” In Casablanca, Central and West African migrants inhabit a suspended transit, where climate vulnerability, racialization, and externalized controls produce regimes of enforced waiting and precarity. Comparison traces shared logics and situated grammars of racialization across Global South migration regimes.

The relationship between human-caused environmental change and human mobility is deeply embedded in humanity’s history. Dispossession, displacement, and forced migration tied to land and environmental resources—often justified through extraction, development, conservation, and preservation—are centuries-old processes central to racial capitalist colonial modernity. Understanding climate change–related (im)mobilities today therefore requires reckoning with histories of violent ruptures and continuities, including how laws and policies governing land tenure, sedentarization, Indigenous sovereignty, environmental management, migration, and housing have been used to legitimize dispossession and obscure the rights of colonial modernity’s “disposable” subjects. Drawing on critical, decolonial, feminist, racial, economic, and environmental justice approaches, this presentation situates contemporary experiences of climate-related (im)mobility among Indigenous peoples within broader debates on coloniality, unsustainable environmental governance, and housing justice. It also seeks to disrupt epistemic violence in dominant knowledge production and policy frameworks that reproduce narrow, harmful ideologies shaping land, climate, and migration governance. We do so by foregrounding Indigenous ontologies, traditional knowledges, and worldviews on nature, mobility, and adaptation in the context of environmental change and colonial sedentarization. Finally, the presentation connects present-day climate vulnerabilities, displacement, and homelessness among Indigenous communities to enduring legacies of dispossession in the North American context.

The past two years have seen the hottest periods on global record (Alahmad et al., 2023). In this paper we investigate how long-standing vulnerabilities of labour migrants from the global South and often formerly colonised countries working in Europe’s agricultural sectors are exacerbated by climate change-induced heat stress. We explore how broader constructs of racialisation and ongoing colonial tropes historically developed in tropical geographies systematically differentiate black and brown bodies as “invulnerable” to heat stress. In addition to lack of access to housing, healthcare and basic labour rights; racist exploitation and the strenuous labour itself; heat stress presents yet another challenge for agricultural labourers.

This paper examines previously ignored links between labour exploitation, racialisation and growing heat stress stemming from global climate change. We focus on the case of labourers from South Asia in Italy and West Africa in Spain – both countries are key agricultural producers and prone to extreme temperatures. We break from the trend of focusing on extreme heatwave events, by taking a long-term temporal approach to understanding cumulative impacts. The paper thus aims to address urgent gaps in knowledge of how climate change-induced heat stress, migrant precarity and racialisation shapes multidimensional and long-term vulnerabilities.

This paper examines identity as a key dimension of social cohesion, shaping trust and collective action in urban climate displacement settings. Building on Wacquant’s concept of territorial stigmatization, the study adopts a comparative perspective to show that marginalized communities do not respond uniformly to stigma. Among informal settlements exposed to climate risk, those with longer, more entrenched histories of stigmatization develop stronger and more institutionalized mechanisms of solidarity.

Using a qualitative narrative approach, the analysis draws on key informant interviews, focus groups, and photovoice with residents of Old Fadama, Glefe, and Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. Findings show how ethnically diverse residents in highly stigmatized contexts contest negative place-based stereotypes, mobilizing shared territorial identity to build trust, cooperation, and collective capacity to address everyday precarity, including eviction risk, flooding, and climate-induced mobility. Local governance structures play a critical role in sustaining cohesion, while resistance to stigma takes gendered forms. Compared to communities with less entrenched stigma, those with stronger solidarity infrastructures exhibit more coordinated adaptive responses. Overall, the study demonstrates that territorial stigma can function not only as a source of marginalization but also as a catalyst for collective identity formation and resilience in urban climate displacement contexts.

As climate change intensifies across Southern Africa, Botswana faces rising temperatures alongside emerging patterns of climate-related mobility, with projections indicating the growth of both out-migration and in-migration hotspots. Regardless, the political dimensions shaping how such future climate mobilities are remain underexplored. Hence, driven by the desire to inform preparedness, the current study examined media discourse surrounding the 2025 Botswana nationwide floods, situating the event within broader debates on the politics of climate mobilities. Specifically, it questioned whether: i) the framing of the floods by the local news media ‘drew attention to the injustices of disruption and the potential for future climate-mobility disasters’, or instead depoliticised them, and ii) the coverage had the potential to motivate development stakeholders to ‘address climate mobilities with both urgency and care’. Utilising the multimodal discourse analysis and framing theory, the study conducted a textual and visual analysis of a purposively sampled corpus of news articles published between February and March 2025. Preliminary findings suggest that dominant media narratives largely portrayed the floods as natural or emergency events, privileging visible displacement and reactive short-term response while marginalising structural drivers, involuntary immobility, unequal exposure, and longer-term climate-mobility trajectories.

Climate-induced disaster events in India continue to be mediated through short-term news reporting that tends to privilege sensational impacts over long-term mobilities. Drawing from qualitative analysis of mainstream newspaper coverage of climate-induced disaster events in India, I interrogate how media time-compresses climate debates while maintaining blindness to everyday (im)mobilities of communities. Media framing of events determines policy choices and governance responses – by influencing certain forms of movement (evacuation, relief, and return) that are easily visible (and become governance ‘objects’), while other forms remain obscured (seasonal migration and long-term displacements). Media analysis reveals how media coverage peaks close to extreme events and rapidly declines afterwards, thus obscuring the climate discourse away from the chronic issues of displacement and mobilities and their links with governance decisions. The paper highlights that through a narrow framing and affect-heavy storylines, the media is actively pushing climate policy responses towards more short-term thinking. The paper concludes by advancing the idea that to impact meaningful change in climate-mobility governance, risk communication needs urgent reimagination by the media through alternative narrative and framing strategies that look beyond the ‘storms’ and capture the long-term ‘journey’, which actively centres around community agency and highlights local and regional vulnerabilities.

This paper examines the representational politics of climate mobilities by analysing popular science books on the subject, which have proliferated in recent years. These include Sonia Shah’s The Next Great Migration (2020), Parag Khanna’s Move (2021), Gaia Vince’s Nomad Century (2022), Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement (2023), Abrahm Lustgarten’s On the Move (2024) and Julian Hattem’s Shelter from the Storm (2026). These texts have received critical acclaim from influential outlets and individuals, bolstering their arguments. While there are important differences between them, there are also notable similarities: a tendency to present the future as one where large swathes of the planet will be uninhabitable and a new phase of intensified movement will occur, with its tensions needing to be managed. By prioritising the question of relocation and its politics, there is less focus on the consequences of places, practices and histories potentially being lost (or abandoned). This paper scrutinises the popular science approach to climate mobilities, asking what it means to present places as uninhabitable, to already articulate them as future non-places. Ultimately, it argues that this category of widely circulated writing routinely trades in crisis narratives that undermine the pursuit of climate mobility justice.

Policy responses to climate-related mobility are shaped by implicit models of migration and by media representations that define how such movements are understood. How climate migration is framed, whose voices are amplified, and which policy imaginaries are made visible influence how governments respond. This paper examines media portrayals of climate migration in South Asia, a region with diverse migration responses across mountain, dryland, and coastal ecosystems, and considers their implications for policy across national contexts.

We analyse more than 3,000 English-language newspaper articles published between 2014 and 2024 in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India, using comparative critical discourse analysis across outlets with different ownership structures and political orientations. We identify distinct but overlapping frames that portray migration as adaptation, development failure, security risk, or governance challenge. National patterns are evident: Bangladeshi media emphasises displacement, crisis, and global responsibility, while Indian coverage focuses more on internal labour migration, urbanisation, and rural distress. Across contexts, some narratives highlight migrants’ agency and resilience, while others frame mobility as burden and threat, reinforcing technocratic and containment-oriented policy responses. These discourses shape understandings of responsibility, rights, and state action, demonstrating how media plays a central role in legitimising particular climate–mobility policy pathways while marginalising others.

This proposal is part of a larger project to assess how the extended and collectively organized participation of the civil society in the “greening” process within the Inter-American court developments regarding the planetary environmental crisis may ultimately serve to re-politicize climate change so to include the “disposable lives” or “precarious life”: the precarized subjectivities. To do so, it initially proposes to trace back two key and novel concepts developed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in its Advisory Opinion 32/2025 (“climate vulnerability”, “people mobilized in the context of climate change”) in the written observations (or “amicus curiae”) submitted by collectively organized NGOs and communities that participated in the proceedings before the court. It will use AI in a first instance (there were, in total, 263 written submissions) to then run content analysis on written pieces and qualitatively assess the use.Climate-related issues are often viewed solely on environment-centric lens which risk is to suspend the proper political dimension by the production of de-politicization,erasing how vulnerabilities are structural racialized. The collectively organized participation particularly in the process of the Advisory Opinion 32/2025 is part of an exercise of repoliticization to make audible, visible and countable as humans the precarized subjectivities.

Climate change challenges the foundations of universal human rights by rendering many places unsafe or uninhabitable. Scholarship on climate mobility predominantly focuses on those who move, leaving understudied the experiences and claims of those who remain—whether involuntarily trapped or actively asserting their desire to stay. This article asks whether a legal entitlement to stay in place can be articulated within existing or emerging legal frameworks.

While freedom of movement is often interpreted as a right expressed through mobility, with staying in place viewed as passive, one of its most vital expressions may lie in the conscious decision to remain in one’s territory (Zickgraf, 2021), as a place-based expression of agency and self-determination. Adopting a socio-legal approach, this review examines how staying in contexts of climate vulnerability is framed, implied across legal and interdisciplinary literatures.

Recent scholarship indicates that legal regimes are not adequately equipped to recognise the diverse reasons for remaining in place or the vulnerabilities shaping such decisions (Düvell, 2025). Integrating intersectional and gendered perspectives, the article outlines legal mechanisms for safeguarding a right to stay. In doing so, it advances debates on climate (im)mobilities and contributes to an understanding of rights, agency, and place amid global environmental change.

In KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) articulated an innovative and controversial approach to the notion of victimhood, which has sparked significant debate. On the one hand, in view of the exclusion of actio popularis, the Court rejected the applications presented by four individual applicants based on the requirement of the imminence of harm. On the other hand, it recognised locus standi for the association of Senior Women for Climate Protection Switzerland in light of the principle of inter-generational burden-sharing. These conclusions reveal the inconsistent approach of the Court to victimhood, as well as the tension between the structural features of the Convention system and climate change. This presentation contributes to the ongoing debate by critically reviewing victimhood in a way that might benefit potential climate refugees’ cases brought before the ECtHR. In doing so, it delves into the imminence/future generation dichotomy found in KlimaSeniorinnen in light of the broader legal landscape.

Coastlines are like laboratories for how we choose to adapt to changes in the environment: from techno-solutionism and infrastructure for areas considered worthy of protection, to the assessment of uninhabitability leading to various forms of human mobility, with perhaps a middle ground consisting of occupying the landscape differently. Using anthropological data from critical literature and fieldwork conducted in three coastal cities, in France, Guadeloupe and Senegal respectively, I attempt to draw legal conclusions for fair coastal futures. The law is both omnipresent and difficult to find in my research, and it is complicated to formulate recommendations as I want to embrace the full complexity of the subject. The best solution I have found so far is to recognise that the law can only be contextual, rooted in the history of the place, but to highlight certain relevant criteria that must be taken into account to avoid political and economic appropriation of the solution. I have identified three at this stage: the possibility for people to recreate a home for themselves, which depends on margin of choice they have; equity in the process; and a strong concern for sustainability.

The International Court of Justice issued its Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change (AO) in July 2025, following a process conceived and led by Pacific Island actors. Being rooted in the lived experiences of climate-harmed communities expiriencing displacements, constrained (im)mobility, and the anticipatory loss of territory and socio-cultural continuity, the AO challenges high-emitting States’s refusal to accept legal accountability for climate damage. Drawing on twelve submissions and summary documents from States and regional groups, I show how historically high-emitting States depoliticise claims of responsibility, framing climate harm as a contemporary, forward-looking problem. Contrastingly, Pacific States frame climate change as systemic violence rooted in colonial histories and extractivism; emphasising that forced displacements, involuntary immobilities, and the erosion of a place are foreseeable consequences of cumulative emissions. Such competing narratives expose the political tension between climate-vulnerable States’ demands for reparative justice including loss and damage, legal reparations, and territorial integrity and the Global North’s reliance on voluntary finance and legal ambiguity to evade enforceable obligations. Despite its limitations, the AO advances a reparative legal framework by recognising climate harm as legal-moral injury, affirming historical responsibility, and opening pathways toward enforceable reparations

CLIMARES is a research consortium that investigates resilience strategies used by different population groups in diverse African contexts to address climate-related and intersecting threats and uncertainties. Through knowledge∞action networks, the project seeks to support populations to increase their agency and resilience to extreme weather events and other threats and uncertainties amplified by climate change. We focus especially on smallholders, fisherfolks, urban precarious outdoor workers, pastoralists, and displaced people, in countries such as Morocco, Senegal, Uganda, DRC, and Mozambique.

In this panel, we introduce the project and some of the first-year PhD students present their ideas and preliminary findings, paying specific attention to the everyday mobilities of these different groups. Instead of migration as adaptation, we look at forms of (im)mobility as everyday practices of adaptation and in relation (or potentially resistance) to different mobility regimes. People may not always need to move completely to a different environment, but instead fisherfolks may look for different waters, farmers may choose different plots of land to cultivate certain crops, and pastoralists may change their transhumance patterns. At the same time, displaced populations may continue to maintain levels of mobility and connectivity with their communities of origin to mobilise livelihoods and resources.

We invite participants to think along about ways in which everyday mobility as a climate adaptation response can and needs to be made visible, could or should be theorized, and better supported through legal and policy frameworks and which space it may have in early warning and early action initiatives.

We present panel data that allows tracing the impacts of riverbank erosion and flooding in the context of Bangladesh’s Jamuna River (Bangladesh Environmental Mobility-Panel) across a number of dimensions: (im)mobility, including short- and long-distance movement patterns; socio-economic outcomes; and political attitudes. The data set tracks 1,689 households with a total of 2,170 respondents from 2021 to 2024 through four large annual in-person survey waves and 10 shorter bi-monthly phone survey waves, resulting in a total of 24,273 completed surveys. Respondent selection based on a spatially-randomized draw together with minor attrition across survey waves enables generalizability of the data to the broader population in villages at risk of riverbank erosion on the 250 km eastern bank of the Jamuna. The data will be particularly useful for scholars researching (im)mobility, as migrants were scrupulously tracked, and for scholars researching environmental change, as erosion occurrence is plausibly exogenous. By supplementing household head questionnaires (n=1,689) with surveys of spouses (n=268), youth (n=213), and left-behind household members (n=289), by gathering village-level data through quantitative village profiles and qualitative focus group discussions, and by conducting additional qualitative interviews with female respondents, the data allow for a gendered, age-sensitive, and contextual perspective on the above-mentioned issue areas.

In recent decades, there have been significant advancements in modeling climate-related migration. A range of approaches have been developed and applied to an equally wide range of contexts. Despite substantial progress, the variety of modeling efforts and applications makes it very difficult to compare and evaluate these models. This inhibits the ability of climate-related migration modeling efforts to meaningfully inform policy. For climate-related migration models to be useful for policymakers, more standardization, comparison, and integration of existing efforts is necessary. In this presentation, we present progress on a recently launched intercomparison project for mobility and migration modeling in the context of climate change, the 3MIP. Model intercomparison projects (MIPs) elsewhere have contributed to enhancing models and their outputs for end-users. Based on the opportunities that MIPs present to the field of environmental and climate mobilities, we have launched the first 3MIP effort focused on soliciting and comparing models of climate-related migration in the context of coastal Bangladesh. We are in the process of building the 3MIP network, with the goal of continuing to expand in the future. The ECMN26 conference represents an opportunity to receive input from the wider environmental and climate migration community, and to identify key paths forward.

As the climate emergency progresses, “data” is increasingly deemed as necessary for policy and programming alike. However, due in part to previous misadventures, researchers from Climate Mobilities have been reluctant to contribute to models projecting future mobility data. This vacuum has been filled by researchers outside of the discipline with mixed success. Models within Economics may adopt a rational actor approach, while those informed by Natural Sciences and Engineering might make deterministic assumptions which foreground hazards and exposure at the expense of considering populations. As a result, the very models informing policy debates and resonating with the media may not be informed by theoretical or conceptual developments emanating from mobilities researchers. This means, for example, until now there has been little attempt to represent the aspirations and capabilities approach in mobility models. Two models will be introduced and compared in order to demonstrate the possibility of filling this gap; i) the latest iteration of the IDMC disaster displacement risk probabilistic model and ii) the Pacific Climate Mobility Initiative (PCMI) agent-based model. The paper will show the ways in which quantitative and qualitative approaches and researchers can be complementary and that the challenge of producing projections should be embraced, not avoided.

The last 10-15 years have seen a growing number of empirical and theoretical studies on climate mobility. However, this research has been fragmented geographically, methodologically, and theoretically and regarding which drivers of migration are incorporated into the analysis. Few attempts have been made to employ a truly interdisciplinary approach. Most of the conventional attempts to explore the climate-mobility nexus are either conducted by climate or migration scholars employing monodisciplinary research practices that lack the tools to speak together. Thus, there is a need to bridge climate research and social science within the field of migration. The contribution of this paper is twofold: 1) taking stock of analytical frameworks that study how mobility drivers are connected, and 2), developing a truly interdisciplinary research agenda that examines the circumstances and motives that make people (not) move in a context of climate change, based on an integration of natural- and social science oriented methods, taking a first step in constructing a new analytical model. This model is based on the novel usage of so-called Factors Constellation Analysis (FCA), used in the health sciences, but will in this paper be used to understand climate (im)mobility dynamics and combining natural and social science data.

This research explores whether data-driven methods can explain the relationship between climate change and large-scale pastoralist movements in the Sahel. The region faces drastic climate shifts, including rising temperatures, excessive droughts and large-scale floods. These shifts disrupt traditional pastoral livelihoods as pastoralists move seasonally in search of fresh forage and water for their herd. Environmental changes force them to alter routes, depart earlier, or settle permanently. Existing mobility modelling remains divided: social science research uses qualitative methods to study highly localised strategies while quantitative models prioritise predictive performance but abstract away contextual mechanisms. The proposed conceptual framework addresses this gap by explicitly bridging social science and data-driven modelling. Local perceptions of environmental change and movement decisions are collected through interviews and stakeholder engagement, translated into hypotheses linking climate indicators to mediating variables (e.g. pasture availability) and then tested using historical datasets and ML models. Northern Ghana, a key dry-season destination for cross-border Sahelian pastoralists, serves as a pilot project to test this methodology. Rather than correlating climate data with mobility outcomes in a black-box AI-manner, this
approach models the underlying causal chain. This directly supports IPCC’s call for more context-specific, evidence-based assessments of climate-related mobility while offering tools to anticipate (im)mobility shifts, support early-warning efforts and inform adaptive policy responses across the Sahel.

Rural out-migration has become a persistent feature in Nepal’s livelihood systems, driven by complex and interlinked social, economic and environmental factors. While migration is generally considered a response to limited rural opportunities, it is also a process than can actively reshape the landscapes and communities left behind. Empirical evidence on how migration can transform agricultural outcomes in origin remains mixed across studies, motivating further exploration, focusing on mountain context. This study examines the role of migration in influencing mountain agricultural systems of rural Nepal, where climate change is simultaneously altering farming conditions. It is based on household survey data from two rural origin communities in Nepal with varying topography. In Varagung, higher international migration and stable remittances resulted in selective land abandonment and reduced labour-intensive farming practices, suggesting gradual disengagement from crop agriculture. Whereas in Indrawati, higher internal and circular migration supported continued but reduced cultivation rather than withdrawal from agriculture. Climate change amplified these migration-induced dynamics in both communities rather than acting as an independent driver of agrarian change. This study contributes to mobility literature by providing a nuanced account of rural transformation driven by migration types and reinforced by climate change.

This presentation explores how climate mobilities intersect with different mobility dynamics and broader socio-economic transformations in rural Chile. Drawing on a multi-method study in central-southern Chile, an area marked by intensifying droughts and forest fires, we analyze the entangled effects of two seemingly opposing mobility dynamics: outward climate mobilities driven by environmental stress and livelihood disruptions, and inward amenity and return migrations motivated by rural lifestyle aspirations, health concerns, and rural tranquility. Through a place-based approach, we show how the convergence of these flows reshapes local landscapes, demographics, economies and land use, intensifies pressures on scarce resources, and alters community cohesion and vulnerability to climate hazards. We argue that these ‘entangled mobilities’ illuminate how climate change interacts with broader socio-economic and territorial transformations: Rather than separate and oppositional, climate and amenity mobilities emerge as mutually constitutive forces that both reflect and reproduce wider processes of rural de-agrarianization, land commodification, and the redefinition of what it means to inhabit rural Chile under climate change. The study highlights the value of place-based, historically informed approaches to understanding human mobilities in the context of climate change.

Since the 1980s, Morocco has experienced the expansion of groundwater-based irrigation frontiers, driven by agricultural intensification, export-oriented crops, and a shift from shallow to deep groundwater use. While groundwater initially enabled agricultural expansion in desert margins, declining aquifer levels, access restrictions, and rising production risks have pushed farmers to seek water and land beyond national borders. This paper examines water-driven agricultural mobilities through the case of Moroccan farmers relocating part of their farming activities to southern Mauritania since the 2010s. Drawing on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork following farmers’ trajectories between Morocco and Mauritania, it analyses how water scarcity, and agrarian policies interact to produce South–South mobilities.

We conceptualise these movements as non-permanent mobilities, characterised by the seasonal circulation of farmers, skilled labour, technologies, and knowledge. In Mauritania, Moroccan farmers benefit from river-based irrigation and favourable policy conditions while introducing intensive irrigation technologies. These mobilities generate agrarian frontiers that reshape land use and labour relations, while also producing socio-environmental tensions. The findings highlight ambivalent outcomes, including employment opportunities and skill transfer alongside risks of water overuse, land price inflation, and exclusion from decision-making. By foregrounding water as a central driver of mobility, this paper contributes to climate mobilities debates beyond displacement narratives.

Over the past couple of decades, the wider Sahel region, including parts of Morocco, Mauritania, and Mali, has experienced increasing climate variability, marked by prolonged periods of drought. These changes have had significant impacts on labor demand in drought-affected regions, leading to losses of agricultural employment. At the same time, irrigation frontiers continue to expand through intensified groundwater extraction and favorable policies promoting intensive agricultural development. These newly irrigated areas are largely dedicated to high-value crops, often oriented toward export markets, and rely on significant labor mobilization. The paper examines how agricultural labor mobilities are altering by increasing drought and the expansion of irrigation frontiers.

Using a feminist approach, it explores how drought-related livelihood losses and the expansion of irrigated agriculture are re-configuring rural–rural and South–South labor mobilities, and how these movements contribute to reshaping agricultural labor hierarchies structured by gender, place of origin, socio-economic background, skills, and ethnicity. By documenting environmental-related mobilities beyond rural–urban and South–North trajectories, this paper engages with debates in critical migration scholarship and highlights the value of a feminist analysis for understanding gendered conditions and inequalities shaping agricultural-water mobilities.

The Indian Himalayas are at the forefront of climate change, which is experienced through drying springs, failing terraces, shifting rainfall patterns, and growing uncertainty around agrarian livelihoods. This paper examines gendered (im)mobilities in Uttarakhand, India, and how environmental transformations intersect with decades of sustained male out-migration, producing villages marked by skewed gender ratios, ageing populations, and ghost villages. Through long-term ethnographic research conducted across five village clusters, I treat migration as outcome that shapes everyday life, focusing on the “left-behind” women and elderly. I approach it as condition that reshapes everyday life, agrarian livelihoods, and ecological relations for those who remain behind and hold ecological knowledge amid environmental change.

I draw on dozens of interviews, life histories, and extended participant observation to show how prolonged male out-migration reorganizes agricultural labour, care responsibilities, and the stewardship of water and land. Conceptually, the paper brings together the blended framework of feminist political ecology and ecological habitus to trace how embodied practices, seasonal routines, access, and memories of soil and water mediate responses to environmental change. By centering ethnographic voices, the study contributes to debates on climate mobilities and vulnerabilities of the left-behind populations, while offering grounded insights for policy and local governance.

Most studies on climate-induced migration focus on international or internal movements, often overlooking those who remain behind. Yet, the decision to migrate or stay is rarely unilateral, shaped by social, environmental, and demographic factors. This study examines migration intentions from a gendered perspective in Ghana’s Volta Delta, an area frequently affected by flooding. Using secondary data from the Immobility in a Changing Climate project, multinomial logistic regression is applied to a three-category dependent variable: households that do not want to move, households that wanted to move before but not currently, and households that currently want to move. The primary independent variable is gender, with controls for age, educational attainment, income level, household headship, and flood exposure. Results show that place attachment, discrimination, religious practice, child safety, and migrant capital significantly shape migration intentions, reflecting local gender roles. Interestingly, discrimination appears to motivate men to consider moving in the past, but has no effect on women, while men’s heightened concern for child safety reduces their current desire to migrate. These findings underscore the importance of considering gender and social context in climate mobility research, offering insights for policy and interventions that address both migrants and those who remain in climate-affected regions.

Although substantial progress has been made in identifying drivers of internal migration over the past two decades, most quantitative studies rely on additive frameworks assuming minimal interactions between micro, meso, and macro scale characteristics. In contrast, qualitative research highlights that migration decisions are shaped by sex-specific interactions of socio-economic and environmental conditions. This study is the first to quantitatively assess the strength of these interactions between men and women using data from a 2023 survey conducted in Senegal, West Africa. We compared two modelling frameworks: a spatial Bayesian model capturing additive effects and a random forest model accounting for interactions and non-linear relationships. Disaggregating by sex revealed distinct effects (socioeconomic and environmental shocks have different effects on men and women) and distinct interactions between characteristics. We highlight the role of temperature anomalies and variability, while average precipitation showed non-linear relationships. We emphasise the importance of explicitly considering gender to avoid overlooking non-linear socioeconomic and environmental effects. Future work will involve using the 2023 Census to model gender-specific migration flows across several spatial scales (from local to regional). Finally, our results have significant implications for understanding gender-specific migration patterns and decisions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rural livelihoods and communal resource governance in South Asia are being reshaped by climatic and socio-demographic changes driven by male outmigration. Although existing literature suggests that men’s absence creates opportunities for women’s empowerment through greater visibility in decision-making spaces, there is limited evidence on whether this representation leads to genuine agency.

Drawing on empirical research from Nepal, using FGDs (7), KIIs (30), and semi-structured interviews (120), this paper argues that increased female representation and labour contributions in irrigation management have not translated into meaningful governance authority.

The analysis identifies five mechanisms that maintain patriarchal control: (1) entrenched gender norms and land–financial structures; (2) “remote patriarchy”, where absent migrants retain authority; (3) intersectional caste and class disparities; (4) institutional erosion following climate disasters and youth outmigration; and (5) climate-related despair and the loss of agrarian futures, which weaken incentives for long-term governance engagement.
By examining gendered decision-making power in water governance in the context of climate change and mobility, the paper shows how demographic change, ecological stress, and gender norms interact to produce visibility without power. The findings contribute to debates on climate mobility, the feminisation of agriculture, and water governance, and highlight the limits of participatory reforms under overlapping crises.

Climate change–induced environmental displacement (CCED) has emerged as one of the most pressing yet politically under-addressed consequences of climate change in India. 5.4 million people are internally displaced in the year 2024, according to the Global Report on Internal Displacement by IDMC, due to slow-onset and sudden environmental events, yet their mobility remains largely depoliticized within legal and policy frameworks that prioritizes disaster response over rights, dignity, and long-term justice. This paper undertakes a critical legal analysis of the rights of environmentally displaced people (EDPs) in India, placing displacement within broader questions of power, governance, and political responsibility. It interrogates how existing legislative regimes, particularly disaster management, land acquisition and forest rights, produce distinguished consequences for “winners” and “losers,” disproportionately marginalizing indigenous communities, rural livelihoods, women, children and the domesticated left-over animals. Erected on doctrinal legal analysis, a field-based case study from coastal Odisha, the paper demonstrates interdisciplinary insights from climate migration studies and law. By bridging law and lived experience, the study argues for a preventative, rights-based legal framework that reconceptualizes CCED as an issue of climate justice, state accountability, and planetary politics in the Global South.

Climate-related migration is increasingly recognised as one of the least regulated consequences of climate change. Despite growing scientific consensus on the scale of environmentally induced displacement, neither international law nor European Union (EU) migration law provides a comprehensive legal framework addressing the protection needs of persons displaced by these factors. Within this normative gap, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have become central actors in shaping policy debates, particularly at the EU level.

This article examines the role of NGOs in promoting the inclusion of climate-related migration on the EU policy agenda. Focusing on their interactions with key EU institutions, it analyses how NGOs contribute to agenda-setting, norm development, and policy framing through lobbying and advocacy practices. This research draws on data from the EU Transparency Register and institutional documents, adopting a legal and political perspective.

This work highlights that NGOs act as policy entrepreneurs by reframing climate-related migration within EU governance structures. Nevertheless, more effective channels for NGO participation are needed to enable earlier and systematic involvement in the design of preventive norms. The research concludes with specific recommendations to strengthen the influence of NGOs on the EU agenda to integrate a human rights-based response to climate displacement.

Climate change is increasingly reshaping livelihoods through droughts, crop failures, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events, particularly in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Migration has become a crucial household strategy for managing these climate-induced risks. This paper examines how village-level political capital, households’ close connections to local government officials, shapes migration decisions under environmental stress, and how this influence varies with the intensity of climate shocks. I develop a stylized expected-utility framework in which households weigh expected gains from migration against the costs and risks of remaining in place. The model predicts a nonlinear, inverted U-shaped relationship: political capital has the largest effect at moderate levels of climate stress. Using data from the India Human Development Survey and ERA5 climate records, I implement a two-way fixed effects empirical approach, along with matching. Empirical results are in line with the predictions of the stylized framework: at medium heat stress, political capital increases migration probability by 4.4 percentage points (p < 0.01), while its effect is smaller and statistically insignificant under low or extreme stress. These findings demonstrate that political access mediates climate adaptation, with implications for equitable migration policies and resilience strategies.

Displacement, the forced movement of people from their places of habitual residence, triggers state duty-bearer obligations under human rights law and multilateral and state policy mechanisms.

However, drawing on empirical data from field research in Bangladesh and analysis of relevant multilateral regimes and programming, this paper highlights how the mobility status of displaced people often goes unacknowledged. By ignoring or even mislabeling displaced people as “migrants”, considered a more voluntary form of mobility, states and other duty-bearers often sidestep responsibility, even while participating in international mechanisms ostensibly addressing displacement. This is a problem of political will, not data, reflecting the failure of states and multilateral mechanisms, including the UNFCCC and Sendai Framework, to prioritize protracted displacement, ensure meaningful state-level commitments, and make durable solutions programming more than a footnote.

Without rights-affirming solutions programming, displacement becomes protracted, leading to intergenerational loss and damage, as our research shows. However, our data also show how well-designed programming can address loss and damage, advancing displaced people toward a lasting solution. For that to happen, the inadequacies of past and ongoing multilateral approaches must be acknowledged. The definition of “duty-bearer” must also be expanded to include nations that have contributed most to the climate crisis.

This paper presents insights from the Climate Exploitation Risk Index (CERI), developed at the South Asian Institute of Crime and Justice Studies (SAICJS). It examines how climate hazards intersect with gendered vulnerabilities, labour precarity, and unsafe migration pathways across India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The paper examines how policy design, institutional coordination, and governance capacity shape who is able to move safely, who is exposed to exploitation, and whose risks remain unrecognised. By tracing how local climate shocks translate into broader social and economic pressures affecting migration decisions, labour markets, and access to justice we show that climate-induced mobility outcomes are shaped by institutional arrangements and policy responses alongside environmental stress. Our findings highlight how gender and livelihood status intersect with state and non-state responses to climate stress, producing differential protection and risk. In contexts where climate adaptation, labour regulation, and migration governance operate in silos, existing inequalities can be reinforced over time. By situating climate mobility analysis within questions of justice, governance, and public protection, this study contributes to debates on the political dimensions of climate mobilities and demonstrates how data-driven, community-engaged approaches can support more equitable and socially responsive climate action in South Asia

In 2017, one of the largest producers of saline IV solution in the United States, Baxter International, ground to a halt when Category 5 Maria hit Puerto Rico. Four years later, Hurricane Helene hit another Baxter plant in North Carolina. Notably, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not require pharmaceutical companies to have back-up plans. Human reliance on a mundane but ubiquitous medical good – saline IV solution – is being confounded by salty ocean waters that are overheating. As a result, health professionals are rationing saline solution, used for everything from cleaning wounds to delivering medications. I explore the interconnections of planetary and human health, and related (im)mobilities of medical goods, health professionals and patients. At the same time as hurricanes disrupt saline production, they inundate fresh groundwater with salt. Sea level rise also draws salt water inshore, infiltrating the water table and wells. The result is that drinking water is saltier, increasing risks of hypertension and stroke, and forcing well closures. With a more-than-human, material lens, I examine the practicalities and politics of a contemporary reality where drinking water is salty and saline is scarce.

The Wadden Sea and its islands are characterized by their mobility, which people have been living with (and struggling against) since the islands were formed. Ontological borders – between land and sea, for example, or between society and nature – shape how human and more-than-human mobilities are understood, enacted, and governed in the Wadden region’s coastal sandscapes. Governance in these sandscapes (re)affirms ontological borders through interventions that lie on a spectrum from conceptually abstract to firmly material: as regulations, physical infrastructure, and lines on a map.

Using a theoretical framework that combines mobility regimes and borderscapes with sedimentary and (more-than-) wet ontologies, we examine how the interactions and entanglements of human and more-than-human mobilities influence and are influenced by governance. Mobile interviews and participant observation were conducted over 19 weeks on and near the Dutch Wadden Islands of Ameland and Schiermonnikoog. Using these data, we analyzed the extent to which the political ontologies of governance frameworks in the Dutch Wadden align with material and social realities in beach, dune, and (formerly) tidal sandscapes and how these (mis)alignments impact socio-natural sustainability. We propose that a (coastal) sedimentary ontology of human/more-than-human and land/water entanglement is best suited to sustainable socio-natural governance in coastal sandscapes. 

In a human-altered world, many non-human organisms face a host of challenges related to their ability to migrate or remain in place. We argue for a right to a livable locality for non-human organisms further developing and applying arguments for a right to livability in the context of human climate migration. We argue that the right to a livable locality for non-human organisms emerges from the social practice of the international state system. We demonstrate that non-human organisms can be understood as a type of by-catch within the territorial net this social practice casts. Incorporating a right to a livable locality of non-human organisms into conservation practice is advantageous because it frees conservation from a dominant historical and normative evaluative scheme – in situ conservation. In a changing and warmer world, an over emphasis on in situ conservation makes conservation success difficult to achieve. A shift to livability considerations in conservation can guide normative evaluation in emergent conservation paradoxes and problems that arise due to environmental and climatic change.

Drawing on a multi-year research project in Cambodia, this paper develops a multi-method approach for studying thermal (im)mobilities that foregrounds heat as a dynamic, more-than-human process. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2025 and 2026, the paper brings together qualitative, physiological, survey-based, observational, and creative methods to capture how heat flows through bodies, machines, materials, and infrastructures over time.

Methodologically, the paper combines wearable physiological measures, including core temperature sensors, with surveys that document perceived heat stress and everyday coping practices. These data are complemented by ethnographic observation and ride-along methods with mobile workers, allowing heat exposure to be traced as it accumulates across working hours rather than appearing as a single moment of stress. Short qualitative interviews are used situationally, emerging from observed bodily discomfort, fatigue, or changes in work pace.

Creative spatial methods further extend this approach. Sketching and photographic documentation are used to map airflow, enclosure, shade, and the positioning of machines and materials, making visible how heat circulates unevenly through work environments. Together, these methods enable an integrated understanding of thermal mobilities, showing how physiological strain, sensory experience, and material arrangements intersect to shape everyday patterns of movement and immobility in heat-exposed labour settings.

Climate-related (im)mobility has gained prominence in international climate negotiations under the UNFCCC. The issue is framed as one of adaptation, protection or loss and damage. This paper analyses competing discourses from 2018-2024, highlighting changes over time and revealing the multiple possibles and impossibles of climate (im)mobility governance. We analyse key UNFCCC documents, including advocacy by actors e.g. IOM, UNHCR and PDD intended to influence the negotiation texts. Moreover, the research draws on participant observation and qualitative interviews conducted by team members at the UNFCCC COPs from 2018-2024. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, we reveal neoliberal modes of rendering the issue governable. Within the UNFCCC, forced climate (im)mobility has long been framed as loss and damage, though without a right to compensation. Some recent climate litigation cases seek to change that. Island states advocated a “right to stay” and financial support for adaptation, rejecting mobility altogether. This discourse has gained visibility within UNFCCC recently. Meanwhile, the “normalisation” of climate-induced migration and planned relocation in national adaptation strategies is celebrated as progress within UNFCCC. The securitizing discourse framing migrants as security threats persists outside the UNFCCC but is less present inside. We conclude that affected populations are still left to fend for themselves.

Conservative calculations suggest that fifty million people will face internal displacement related to climate causes by 2050 (Durrani 2025, 2). Clements (2024) suggested 500 million climate migrants by 2050 (p. 10287). During internal and external migration, each migrant faces a significant loss of intangible cultural heritage when changing location.

Loss and damage (l&d) mechanisms exist to “compensate” climate migrants for the loss of tangible possessions, including homes, businesses, or land. Individual and community intangible cultural heritage, however, is generally classified as “non-economic loss and damage” (NELD) (UNFCCC 2013, Sec. 8).

This paper is part of a larger project considering the valuation of the ICH of climate migrants. The aim is to determine whether current loss and damage mechanisms are adequate. This presentation will specifically address the application of existing NELD systems for loss and damage, including a critique of the Warsaw International Mechanism, based on data derived from examination of policies, legal instruments, and practice documentation.

Loss and damage are occurring as mitigation and adaptation efforts prove insufficient. Emerging mechanisms, such as the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage and the Santiago Network, offer crucial opportunities to address these impacts. However, understanding of how (im)mobility – including migration, displacement, planned relocation, and voluntary and involuntary immobility – relates to loss and damage remains limited. Under what conditions can rights-affirming, consent-based (im)mobility avert or minimize loss and damage? What limitations constrain the adaptive potential of (im)mobility, leading to loss and damage, and why? How can policies and interventions address multiple (im)mobility challenges simultaneously?

Through exploring these questions, we develop a holistic framework that conceptualises human (im)mobility as a cause, consequence, and strategy to avert and minimise loss and damage, as well as a unique form of loss and damage in some instances (e.g., loss of mobility among nomadic pastoralists). This holistic approach critically examines how political choices, intersecting inequalities, and governance regimes shape these pathways. The framework offers conceptual clarity on the dynamic links between relational (im)mobilities and loss and damage, providing guidance for future research, policy, and practice, including the urgent integration of climate mobilities and immobility into evolving Loss and Damage mechanisms.

Building on a presentation at ECMN 2024 that argued for both an ontological opening and a deliberate closing of the climate mobilities concept, this paper explores what it means to enact such closures in practice, when climate mobilities thinking is translated into adaptation policy and planning. It asks how such a closure process operates across conceptual, political, and institutional dimensions.
The contribution draws on the author’s involvement in developing and implementing a technical guide on integrating human mobility into National Adaptation Plans, as well as advisory work with governments across different world regions. It shows how typologies and categories function as navigation tools that can link abstract mobilities thinking with concrete responsibilities, mandates, and policy entry points within existing governance landscapes and regimes. In this sense, closure might emerge as a prerequisite for coordinated action rather than let go of analytical nuance. The paper then reflects on what this translation process reveals at a more abstract level. It discusses experiences from these research-policy relations, highlighting the value of long-term, trust-based yet critical engagement for understanding how meaning is negotiated and stabilised in practice and policy settings during such translation processes.

In the face of climate change and urbanization in South Africa, green spaces play a crucial role in climate adaptation (Venter et al., 2020; Wolch et al., 2014; Wu & Kim, 2021). In Cape Town, access to greening reflects persistent racial and socioeconomic inequalities, with affluent neighborhoods benefiting disproportionately, while township residents also face heightened exposure to flooding, water scarcity, and wildfires.

Research highlights the importance of participatory planning, capacity building, and socio-psychological factors for ensuring that adaptation measures are context-specific, socially accepted, and sustainable (Rouzaneh & Savari, 2024). Yet, these dimensions remain underexplored. Place attachment is increasingly recognized as shaping whether communities adapt in situ or pursue migration, influencing adaptive capacity and the degree of immobility in vulnerable settings (Adams, 2016, 2019; Blondin, 2021).

This thesis examines these dynamics through a case study of the Green Zone project in Philippi, Cape Town, in collaboration with two local NGOs. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork (15 interviews, stakeholder mapping, site visits), the findings indicate capacity building across all dimensions, fostering pride and collective ownership. Long-term adaptation remains constrained by structural factors such as violence, insecure tenure, and weak institutional support, underscoring the need to pair adaptation with economic opportunity and formal integration.

Political ecology offers a critical framework for examining how power inequalities embedded in production systems, governance, knowledge, and discourse shape human–environment relations. This paper applies a political ecology lens to the study of climate mobility in order to move beyond approaches that conceptualize climate mobility primarily as large-scale displacement or cross-border migration. Drawing on recent extreme climate events in Spain, including the 2024 floods in Valencia, major wildfire events in 2025, and recurrent heatwaves, the paper examines how climate-related (im)mobility is produced through unequal social, economic, and political relations. Rather than asking why people move in response to climate change, the analysis shifts attention to how (im)mobility unfolds in practice and for whom, exploring less visible and often overlooked forms of climate-related mobility, such as in-situ displacement in urban areas following extreme floods, differentiated health impacts and constrained mobility among migrant workers during heatwaves, and the uneven aftermath of wildfires in depopulated rural regions. These cases illustrate how climate impacts intersect with labor regimes, territorial marginalization, and governance failures.

This master’s thesis examines long-standing migration from Northern Ghana and explores how return and reintegration are experienced under changing social, economic and environmental conditions. It draws on qualitative fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews with migrants, with a focus on the town of Bamahu.

The findings show that migration from north to south is not perceived as a response to recent climate change impacts but as a long-established and socially embedded strategy to cope with persisting ecological conditions, such as less reliable rainy seasons. Predominantly young men dependent on rain-fed agriculture migrate in search of income. Family members and local relations support this mobility not only through economic means but also through social safety nets based on emotional care, knowledge and assistance, forms of support often taken for granted in studies on environmental mobilities.
However, when migrants return due to family obligations without the expected resources, family-based support systems can shift from sources of stability to sources of pressure. These challenges are intensified by urbanization, land commodification and socio-economic change, which complicates return. The research shows that human mobility is relational and that migration strategies which once helped families cope can become challenging when people return to socially and economically transformed places.

In mountain landscapes, local populations have practiced mobility for centuries due to harsh weather conditions, contested resources, border conflicts and environmental risks. However, in recent decades, socioeconomic and political factors have reshaped the drivers of mobility. As societies become more socially, economically and politically stable, new patterns of mobility emerge. In the Himalayan foothills of Pakistan, at 2410 m above sea-level, long-distance migration has long served as a livelihood diversification strategy. Yet recent and ongoing infrastructural development aimed at promoting tourism and the regional economy has significantly transformed local mobility trends. The study primarily uses semi-structured interviews to analyze how mobility patterns have evolved over the past few decades and how residents negotiate the daily challenges, risks, and decisions associated with (im)mobility in shaping their long-term futures. In addition, the research examines the extent to which climate change influences mobility decisions, with particular attention to its implications for mountain communities and their adaptive strategies. The findings indicate that the shift from small-scale subsistence agriculture toward market-based food dependency, combined with long-term out-migration, has produced unintended ecological consequences, including increased incursions of monkeys into local villages that threaten livelihoods and settlement stability.

Water (in)security is configured as a complex problem that interweaves climate change, climate mobilities, and gender inequalities. This study proposes an inter- and transdisciplinary approach based on 31 in-depth interviews conducted within the framework of “Guardians of Wate” (Salinas & Becker, 2022), through which the experiences of women living in rural territories in Chile are examined.

The results show that water insecurity generates diverse forms of internal climate mobility, including everyday movements to different localities to access water, wash clothes, or secure basic supplies, followed by daily returns to the home. These mobilities reshape routines, livelihoods, and the social fabric of communities. At the same time, situations of forced immobility are identified, in which the lack of economic resources or viable alternatives constrains the ability to move. In this context, women emerge as key agents of adaptation, developing resilient strategies that sustain social reproduction.
The use of inter- and transdisciplinary methodologies makes it possible to integrate scientific, technical, and community-based knowledge, facilitating dialogue across disciplines and promoting collaborative processes with affected communities and policymakers. This approach contributes to a situated and collective understanding of water security and climate mobilities, oriented toward the co-construction of more just and inclusive adaptive responses.

Environmental relocation, the organised movement of individuals or communities from at-risk areas to perceived safer locations, raises complex questions about people’s agency and participation in shaping their futures amidst a rapidly changing climate risk and governance landscape. In climate mobility research, policy, and advocacy, the notion of ‘agency’ is invoked alongside other value-laden terms such as empowerment and resilience. Yet, the term is often used inconsistently or without clear definition, creating an ambiguity that limits the capacity of both research and policy to operationalise agency substantively rather than simply rhetorically. This paper addresses this gap by undertaking a critical scoping review of the literature on environmental relocation, a field that repeatedly grapples with the tension between voluntary and forced movement. The article screening is currently underway, with 213 articles selected through a title and abstract screening from an original search result of 1092 papers. The analysis will undertake a synthesis of the dominant conceptual approaches, how agency is framed within different geographic and temporal contexts, whose agency is foregrounded or marginalised, and its practical implications within environmental relocation. In doing so, this paper further aims to contribute to ongoing broader debates around voluntariness, consent, and decision-making.

Climate-related planned relocation is increasingly used as an adaptation response, yet there remains limited agreement on what constitutes “just relocation”. Relocation decision-making is inherently temporal, requiring consideration of past harms and attachments, present-day risks and inequities, and long-term futures for wellbeing, culture, and environments. This paper examines how researchers and practitioners prioritise different justice frames in planned relocation, and whether these priorities shift with different planned relocation contexts. Using Q-methodology with 45 academics and professionals, participants ranked 42 statements spanning procedural, distributive, recognition, epistemic, restorative, ecological and intergenerational justice in response to one of two fictional relocation scenarios. Three coherent justice perspectives emerged, emphasising different pathways to justice. Justice reasoning also shifted across scenarios, indicating that priorities are not fixed but partially context-dependent. We argue that planned relocation governance must engage temporal trade-offs explicitly, rather than treating justice as a static checklist, to support more context-responsive and legitimate relocation policy and practice.

Today, many communities and governments are confronted with the possibility of “climate-related planned relocation”, meaning the coordinated, collective, and permanent movement of a community in anticipation or reaction to climate change impacts. Even as climate change introduces new complexities, we must realise that many challenges arising from this are not new. Relocation is most obviously reminiscent of “development-forced resettlement”, but parallels can also be drawn with displacement from extractive industries, environmental conservation, and colonial population transfers. Using a genealogical approach, I revisit the literature on these historical/ongoing processes and the intense debates they engendered. From this, I identify several themes that tend to be downplayed but – I argue – should be central to relocation discussions today. Specifically, I highlight the use of humanitarian framing as a justification for problematic projects and policies; the persistent difficulty in addressing non-material impacts; the contested concept of indigeneity and central role of indigenous peoples in resistance to relocation; and the risk of defeatism that arises from overly technical, depoliticised approaches to relocation. Taken together, these themes emphasise that if we are to avoid reproducing the mistakes of the past, we need a historically-informed and political understanding of relocation research, policy, and practice.

Within the field of human climate mobility, planned relocation and retreat remain among the understudied forms of mobility. In policy contexts, these processes are often treated as highly sensitive and are frequently deferred until discussion becomes unavoidable due to the increasing impacts of climate change. Beyond the sensitive nature of relocations, empirical knowledge on these processes is extremely limited. Against this background, we updated the existing global climate-related planned relocation database by Bower & Weerasinghe (2021), extending its coverage to 2025. To address methodological limitations identified in the existing database, we adopted a more comprehensive approach at a smaller, European scale. The European approach combines systematic reviews of academic literature with the screening of non-academic sources and targeted engagement with local experts. In addition to extending the methodological scope, we refined the definition of relocations to capture more individualized retreats, which are more prevalent in the Global North compared to the Global South. My presentation will focus on the updated global database and the newly developed European database, which will be made publicly available. I will also share findings on geographical, spatial, and disaster-related differences in relocation and retreat cases, and reflect on methodological and conceptual lessons from these mappings.

Very often, planned relocation processes as an adaptation strategy to climate change or disasters are implemented without a comprehensive legal framework. Generally, they rely on multi-sources and sophisticated legal structures whose diversity results in incoherent and often incomplete framework. The organization of roles and responsibilities in the relocation process is also complex as various actors intervene at each step of the process of relocation. Decisions regarding the selection of relocation sites, the design of new housing, and the prioritization of beneficiaries are only a few examples of the moments in which bureaucrats have a crucial role to play. This situation generates a form of legal and institutional opacity that may directly aOect the daily lives of relocation beneficiaries. Combining Law and Political Sciences, Drawing on the case of the relocation project in Mocoa, Colombia, and based on semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis, this communication seeks to address how the law operates in the daily experience of people undergoing relocation. More specifically, it will analyze how the normative, institutional and bureaucratical dispersion characterizing this relocation process impacts the beneficiaries of this project.

This paper reflects on an arts-based, participatory research process developed through collaboration between an artist, a researcher, a local NGO, and youth living in informal settlements in Suva, Fiji. Instead of treating climate (im)mobility as something to be measured or predicted, the research used creative practice as a shared way of thinking, talking, and working across disciplines, languages, and lived experience.

The research project combined art workshops, relational dialogue, interviews, and a public exhibition. Creative work allowed participants to move away from technical climate terms and to express climate and mobility through what they experience every day, such as flooding that cuts off access to the community, disrupted schooling, polluted rivers, conflict, and repeated movement within and between settlements. The process also created spaces where youth could speak and translate their experience into visual narratives, that could be shared with wider publics and policymakers.

The paper focuses on what this kind of collaboration makes possible, and what it requires in practice. It shows how working across art, research, and community practice takes time and care, and can slow down extractive research habits, open up different forms of knowledge, and allow for accessible conversations about climate change and mobility.

Researching climate-related mobilities poses specific methodological challenges, particularly when actors, resources, and practices are continuously on the move and embedded in different socio-political and environmental contexts. Drawing on multi-country research examining how water scarcity, environmental change, and agricultural policies shape agricultural and labor mobilities in the wider Sahel region, this paper proposes a methodological framework combining interdisciplinary collaboration, itinerant fieldwork, and a multi-sited research design. First, we explore how interdisciplinary dialogue enables the combination of remote sensing–based maps with in-depth interviews with mobile actors, allowing social dimensions of mobility and environmental change to be integrated into spatial analyses. Second, we develop an itinerant methodology that follows mobile actors across regions and national borders, rather than relying solely on retrospective accounts. This approach allows observation of how environmental change, water scarcity, and agricultural policies shape mobility decisions in practice. Finally, we reflect on how to place multiple field sites in dialogue across national and ecological contexts while prioritizing grounded research rooted in local social, cultural, political, and economic realities. By foregrounding methodological experimentation and interdisciplinary dialogue, this paper offers concrete tools for studying mobility as an embedded process.

Saint-Louis in Senegal is an emblematic UNESCO site sited between the Atlantic coast and the Senegalese river delta, known for its fisher community. While historically impacted by coastal risks, 2016-2018 marked a turning point as about 3000 of them lost their homes to the sea. A massive relocation was planned, with 15,000 people rehoused 10km far from the shoreline by 2026. Many biophysical studies were implemented alongside the project, but fewer were done to tackle social impacts of planned relocation on place attachment, well-being and long-term consequences. In this context, we implemented a mixed method approach to study the consequences of relocation, and accompany the communities in a sensitive way towards this major transition. We used both quantitative and open-ended surveys, and a forum-theater piece as a transdisciplinary co-creation to discuss with the communities about their future, either they should stay or leave the sea. The surveys indicate a strong place attachment deified by forced mobility, as well as a loss of well-being in the short-term. Forum theater appeared as a powerful tool to tackle a diversity of emotions about the future, regarding fear of identity loss or hopes of its reinvention through mobility in the face of climate change.

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the three participatory research conducted within the GenderedClimateMig project with persons who have migrated to Malaysia, Mexico and Morocco. It examines how participatory methodologies shape participants’ perceptions of climate change and its role in their migration trajectories, while critically engaging with the ethical implications of knowledge co-production in research with migrant communities. The analysis examines how participatory approaches, through their collective dimensions, rework epistemic frames and political meanings of climate-related migration, enabling shifts between politicization and depoliticization in the perception of climate-induced mobilities. Drawing on focus groups and participatory research designs, the study examines how migration experiences and subjectivities are collectively articulated and situated within broader climate change framings, revealing how dominant narratives are negotiated or contested. This paper contributes the literature on the epistemologies of participatory methodologies – furthering our understanding as to how research designs influence framing – and on the perceptions of climate change, to understand the various forms of (de)politicization of climate change and migrations. The comparison of our three fieldwork sites in the Global South serves to deepen our understanding of the circumstances that favour, or in contrast tend to limit, the politicization of environmental factors of migration.

This paper describes the role of climate in changing Maasai pastoralist movement patterns, from their own perspective, revealing how temporary labor migration of younger males alters the social resilience of the community across dryland landscapes. Splitting the boma (household) and living translocally with multiple wives in different locations emerges as strategy to cope with changing landscapes and shrinking productive lands. We draw from 102 in-depth women and men across three districts in Tanzania – in both destination and origin areas, in mixed farmer/harder villages as well as predominantly Maasai settlements – plus 3 focus group discussions using an innovative photography method.

This one day research symposium focuses on the more-than-human mobilities of living in and on the sea in any form. Building on current themes of water, oceans, and coasts we invite participants to share research about the mobilities of living in and on the sea. From seaworm casts built from shifting sands, to limpets and their home scars, seaweed holdfasts, oil rigs, seagrass, boats, weather, bridges, migrations, myths and stories this interdisciplinary day will explore the tensions between mobility and anchorage within a fluid environment.

The symposium extends Cemore’s focus on Climate Emergency to more-than-human thinking about the sea, for a rich multi-disciplinary gathering. The name Being at Sea also indicates the shifting uncertainties of working with fluid boundaries in our constantly changing political, technical, social and environmental emergencies.

The event will combine online talks from three external mobilities scholars (Rachael Squire (UK), Maria Borovnik (NZ) and Mimi Sheller (USA)) with short papers from an interedisciplinary range of mobilities scholars at Lancaster, as well as a session on creative methods in which artists, writers and designers will speak to the theme of ‘being at sea’ in relation to their work.

How do climate change and environmental risk come to function as governing rationales through which refugee immobility is justified and stabilised? This paper addresses this puzzle by examining how refugee governance is exercised through discourses of climate change and environmental risk, and materialised through non-human infrastructures . Focusing on Rohingya refugee management in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, it analyses water, land, embankments, and island formations not as passive environmental settings but as infrastructures through which refugee immobility is governed

Rather than treating climate change as an external driver of displacement, the paper conceptualises environmental risk as a discursive and material resource mobilised by governing actors to justify spatial containment under the language of protection and adaptation. Drawing on critical analysis of policy documents, project reports, spatial data, and qualitative research produced by the state and international humanitarian organisations, the study examines how erosion control, flood mitigation, and island engineering are enrolled in sovereign strategies of refugee governance. It analyses how discourses of climate risk are translated into infrastructural interventions that frame immobility as technical and necessary, while shifting responsibility for survival onto displaced populations and obscuring the political decisions embedded in environmental design.

Climate-resilient planning in displacement settings requires a combination of robust data, field-level insight, and accessible decision-support tools. A case study approach focused on two sites in East Africa, Kule Refugee Camp in Ethiopia and the Renk Transit Centre in South Sudan, demonstrates how these elements can be effectively integrated.

Hydrological and hydraulic models were developed using high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs), rainfall-runoff simulations, and 2D flood modelling to map hazard zones and identify key flood drivers. These technical outputs were complemented by structured interviews and digital surveys with camp staff and humanitarian actors to capture local risk perceptions, vulnerabilities, and adaptation constraints.

A shortlist of flood mitigation options was co-developed and assessed using a cost–benefit framework, with particular attention to feasibility in resource-constrained, displacement-affected environments. Results were synthesised in a dashboard-enabled StoryMap, providing spatially contextualised, user-friendly outputs to support both technical teams and operational decision-makers.

This approach links modelling, economic analysis, and field engagement to deliver actionable insights for adaptation planning in fragile settings. It offers a replicable methodology for translating climate risk data into practical recommendations in contexts facing growing displacement pressures due to climate impacts.

The provision of safe, reliable clean water is a major challenge in refugee camps, where environmental and climatic conditions profoundly affect overall living conditions. The crisis that affected the Rohingya community in Myanmar which peaked in 2017 resulted in the displacement of refugees to Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district. As a consequence,  numerous camps were established in a confined area, housing over 700,000 refugees, and posing significant environmental and health risks. Recognising the links between environmental drivers, climate variability and the provision of essential ecosystem services is crucial; nevertheless, comprehensive and integrated datasets to support evidence-based management and policy remain scarce. 

Remote sensing observations and environmental monitoring can provide valuable insights on the evolving living conditions within these camps, yet the integration of heterogeneous data streams and the assembly of high quality, harmonised datasets continue to pose major challenges. This study seeks to fill this gap for the refugee settlements in Cox’s Bazar district by collecting, quality controlling, and integrating a suite of environmental, climatic and ecosystem service data.

We concentrate on three key stressors impacting the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, namely (1) overpopulation and settlement dynamics, (2) reduced ecosystem services caused by land use changes climate related impacts stemming from anomalies in the climate regime, (3) climate related impacts stemming from anomalies in the climate regime reduced ecosystem services caused by land use changes, while, in parallel, analysing the current water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure, as an intervening factor, and the quality of provided water as the outcome.

This paper examines the intersection of climate change, armed conflict, and gender through the lived experiences of women farmers in South Lebanon. Drawing on qualitative interviews from a social media-based project, it repurposes campaign narratives as empirical material for academic analysis. The study explores how environmental stressors—especially drought, rising temperatures, and water scarcity—interact with conflict-related destruction and economic collapse to reshape women’s livelihoods, mobility, health, and relations to land.

Findings show that these overlapping crises produce gendered forms of constrained mobility, including recurrent displacement, exit from agricultural production, and forced changes in farming practices. At the same time, women express a deep attachment to land, framing agriculture as central to identity and survival rather than only economic activity. This rootedness coexists with physical exhaustion, unpaid care burdens, and psychosocial distress.

Grounded in feminist political ecology and intersectionality, the paper conceptualizes climate change as a threat multiplier within fragile, militarized contexts. It highlights women’s adaptive practices—such as altered irrigation, seed saving, and food self-sufficiency—as everyday resilience largely unsupported by policy. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of advocacy-based qualitative materials for studying climate mobility and immobility, and argues for centering women farmers in climate adaptation and post-conflict recovery.