Using mobilities theory to study the nexus between climate change and human movement

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on ‘climate migration’ has traditionally focussed on the forced movement of people caused by the environmental impacts of climate change. However, this is only one part of the nexus between human movement and climate change. Consequently, researchers drawing on the ‘mobilities paradigm’, particularly those examining the topic of ‘mobility justice’, have sought to develop more encompassing conceptualisations of ‘climate mobilities’. In synthesising the different trajectories of this work, this paper identifies four key themes emerging within early ‘climate (im)mobilities’ scholarship. First, research on the way climate-related movement and stasis are represented and imagined. Second, examination of climate change’s impact on existing and ontologically significant (im)mobility practices. Third, analysis of the power relations that are enacted through climate (im)mobilities. And fourth, study of the inter-scalar nature of climate change-based (im)mobilities connecting disparate local mobility practices through their relationship to climate change. Research findings based on these themes are providing holistic accounts of the relationship between climate change and movement, and thus laying the groundwork for informed justice-based interventions in climate (im)mobility systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate (im)mobilities
• climate migration
• mobilities paradigm
• climate refugees
• climate justice
• mobility justice
• climate change

Introduction

Scholarship on climate migration has traditionally focussed on the forced movement of people caused by the environmental impacts of climate change (e.g. Berchin et al. 2017; Myers 2002). While this work produces important findings about the environmental and human impacts of climate change, it reduces the nexus between human movement and climate change to that of forced physical displacement. The narrowness of this framing is evident in comparison to understandings of movement and stasis developed by mobilities scholars who see (im)mobilities as relationally constructed and involving symbolic and imaginative elements (Cresswell 2010; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). Furthermore, researchers suggest that (im)mobilities are ‘constitutive of the structures of social life [as] it is in these [(im)]mobilities that social life and cultural identity are recursively formed and reformed’ (Urry 2000, 49). In drawing on these mobilities theories, researchers have sought to explore less studied aspects of the climate change--human movement nexus, including the ways that climate change impacts existing (im)mobility patterns (e.g. Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019). Additionally, the recently developed concept of ‘mobility justice’ championed by Mimi Sheller (2018) has pushed mobilities scholars to examine how everyday mobility practices interact with the phenomenon of climate change. This has contributed to growing calls for a shift in terminology from ‘climate migration’ and ‘climate refugees’ to ‘climate mobilities’ (Boas et al. 2018; Boas et al. 2019; Parsons 2019).

In this article, I review significant pieces of research that have embraced a climate mobilities approach to identify the themes that are developing in this growing area of study. In doing so, I find four key research themes that exemplify the importance and potentialities of a ‘climate mobilities’ research framework. First, research on the symbolic and imagined aspects of climate (im)mobilities and not just the way climate change causes physical displacement. Second, examination of how climate change impacts existing and ontologically significant (im)mobility practices thus (re)creating subjects and social relations. Third, study of the power relations that are enacted through and produced by climate (im)mobilities. And fourth, study of the inter-scalar nature of climate change-based (im)mobilities, and consequently the connections between disparate local (im)mobility practices. Examination of these overlapping topics is producing rich and holistic accounts of the relationship between climate change and movement. This is essential for the facilitation of equitable interventions in climate (im)mobility systems, from air travel to pedestrian movement, that are sensitive to the need to tackle climate change and promote justice for marginalized or vulnerable groups.

Moving beyond ‘climate migration’

Traditional ‘climate migration’ research has importantly identified that climate change is traumatically motivating the forced movement of vulnerable populations (e.g. Maldonado et al. 2013). However, climate migration research has propagated dramatic and alarmist claims about large numbers of climate refugees fleeing poorer regions of the world (Berchin et al. 2017; Myers 2002). This work is exemplified by the frequently cited claims of Norman Myers (2002, 609), including that ‘[w]hen global warming takes hold, there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken by sea-level rise and coastal flooding, by disruptions of monsoon systems and other rainfall regimes, and by droughts of unprecedented severity and duration.’ Large climate refugee numbers are also communicated by international bodies and NGOs, such as the UNHCR (2021) which claims that from 2008–2019 climate-related events ‘triggered an average of 21.5 million new displacements each year – more than twice as many as displacements caused by conflict and violence’.

Scholars have criticised such statistics and predictions by suggesting that they overstate the numbers involved; overemphasise international and permanent migration when climate-based migration is often temporary and internal; and reduce the complex motivations behind migration to the single cause of climate change (Bettini 2017; Piguet 2013). These criticisms have pushed climate migration scholarship to become more nuanced, including by seeing climate change as part of a complex meshwork of migratory drivers (Parsons 2019, 673; Piguet 2013, 156). Nevertheless, from a mobilities perspective climate migration research still reproduces several problematic assumptions about human movement.

One of these assumptions is that humans naturally reside in static communities, moving only when forced to do so (e.g. Nawrotzki and DeWaard 2018). Hanne Wiegel, Boas, and Warner (2019, 3) suggest that ‘this discourse neglects existing international, national, and local migration patterns, both temporal and permanent, which people in climate-vulnerable areas are already engaged in for securing their livelihoods.’ Indeed, a central finding of mobilities theory is that movement is a meaningful part of everyday life (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). By not embracing this starting point, climate migration research fails to identify how climate change feeds into and impacts already existent patterns of human (im)mobility.

Climate migration research also assumes that climate change and human movement have a linear cause-and-effect relationship (e.g. Berchin et al. 2017; Maldonado et al. 2013). This obscures mobilities scholarship on climate change that exists beyond that of forced physical displacement. For instance, the examination of how mobilities in wealthy urban settings are influenced by climate change and cause environmental degradation, consequently altering mobility patterns in distant parts of the globe (Sheller 2018; Freudendal-Pedersen 2020). Hence, there is much physical movement motivated in some way by climate change outside of refugee style migrations.

Finally, climate migration research reduces the potential analytical lens to just physical human movement. A key tenet of the mobilities paradigm is that mobilities are an entanglement of physical movement, representations, perceptions, and practices (Everuss 2021; Urry 2000). For example, emotional responses and ‘sense making’, shaped by cultural norms, influence whether people leave or stay put in environments made unstable by climate change (Parsons 2019; Wiegel et al. 2021). Therefore, studying physical movement in an abstract manner inherently produces an impartial account of (im)mobilities. These criticisms underpin the growing argument within the social sciences that climate migration scholarship provides a restrictive lens to understand the intersections between climate change and (im)mobilities (e.g. Boas and Wiegel 2021; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019; Cundill, Singh, and Adger 2021).

Climate (im)mobilities

Central to the contemporary study of climate mobilities is an engagement with the ‘mobilities paradigm’, which promotes sensitivity to the varied forms that movement and stasis can take, and to how kinetic phenomena produce subjectivities and social relations. This is a wide-ranging subject because ‘[m]obility and mobilities appear to be everywhere, underpinning both past and present economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental processes’ (Merriman et al. 2013, 147). Similarly to mobilities, climate change is a pervasive phenomenon. Not only does a great variety of human action contribute to climate change but the effects of climate change are increasingly impacting most human communities (Everuss and Lever-Tracy 2020). Consequently, a vast array of connections exist between (im)mobilities and climate change.

Despite this, Andrew Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe (2019, 289) suggest that ‘“climate change” (i.e. impacts) and the “environment” (i.e. the milieu of bio- and geophysical relations) have all played a relatively minor role in the mobilities paradigm’. This may be disputed if it includes all mobilities research (e.g. Sheller and Urry 2016; Urry 2008), but it does ring true for mobilities research on climate-based migration. Here, mobilities theory has taken a backseat role to traditional migration frameworks, and has been largely confined to the relative positioning of climate change alongside other motivators of forced migration (e.g. Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019).

In contrast, a minority strand of research has used mobilities concepts to expand understandings of the relationship between climate change and human movement in specific ways (e.g. Boas et al. 2018; Boas and Wiegel 2021; Parsons 2019). Mobilities theory has been deployed to guide grounded examination of mobility practices influenced by climate change (e.g. Boas, Dahm, and Wrathall 2020), and some work has studied how human and nonhuman mobilities contribute to climate change (Boas et al. 2018). Additionally, Sheller’s (2018) work on ‘mobility justice’ provides an inter-scaler theoretical framework that connects local interventions in mobility systems to the global phenomenon of climate change. What this article will now demonstrate is how the initial research drawing on the mobilities paradigm and following the lines of analysis promoted by Sheller’s ‘mobility justice’ has developed, and more specifically, what important research themes have been examined by this scholarship.

1. Climate (im)mobilities as more than just physical movement

The first significant research theme that has developed within climate mobilities research is the study of non-physical types of movement and stasis that are interconnected with climate change. Tim Cresswell (2010, 18) famously described mobilities as involving ‘a fragile entanglement of physical movement, representations, and practices’. A similarly multifaceted conceptualisation of movement was presented by John Urry’s (2000) travel typology that alongside physical travel, included imaginative travel using information communication technologies (ICTs); virtual travel across online spaces; and communicative travel through person-to-person mediated messaging. These widened frameworks for understanding movement have influenced the early work seeking to develop a climate mobilities approach (e.g. Ayeb-Karlsson, Kniveton, and Cannon 2020; Boas 2020).

Wiegel et al. (2021) examined how the meanings that people give to their stasis, and especially the risks of staying in the face of climate disasters, shapes the likelihood they will engage in climate migration. Laurie Parsons (2019) identified that physical movement in the face of climate change is influenced by understandings and feelings towards that movement as shaped by cultural representations. Indeed, for Parsons (2019, 671), ‘mobilities, even climate mobilities, are only partially explicable without reference to their emotional context.’ Thus, a research theme that centres analysis on the multifaceted physical and nonphysical nature of climate (im)mobilities is required to produce comprehensive accounts of climate movement and stasis.

The examination of non-physical aspects of (im)mobility is also pertinent to the study of contexts overlooked by a traditional climate migration approach. For instance, representations of the way certain forms of urban mobility emit greenhouse gases and subsequently contribute to climate change are increasingly informing personal mobility decisions and urban mobility system planning (Barr 2018; Freudendal-Pedersen 2020). This includes shifts from oil-fuelled vehicles to electric vehicles and the increasing use of smart technologies across urban mobility networks (Freudendal-Pedersen et al. 2020).

Such mobility iterations and their connection to climate change is as much symbolic as physical. Electric cars are represented as a form of green transport by business stakeholders (Martin 2021), but they may act as ‘barriers to transitions towards sustainable mobilities’ by locking in high emissions practices, including private car usage (Freudendal-Pedersen et al. 2020, 12). Hence, tensions exist within the entangled physical movements, representations, and practices through which modern urban (im)mobilities are connected to climate change, which are relevant to climate (im)mobilities research.

2. The ontological significance of climate (im)mobilities

Mobilities research embraces a mobile ontology by seeing social relations, identities and structures as having (im)mobile qualities and as being produced by the (im)mobilities of people, things and ideas (Everuss 2021; Sheller 2018). This has motivated another significant theme in the climate (im)mobilities research, namely examination of the productive outcomes of climate-related movements and stasis. For example, Martin Anfinsen, Lagesen, and Ryghaug (2019, 45) found that electric vehicle (EV) usage in Norway ‘resulted in drivers identifying themselves as belonging to a different category of drivers motivated towards a different, less aggressive style of driving. Or rather: A new driver identity.’ And just as the embodied practice of EV driving produces new movement patterns and identities, it shapes city spaces by promoting the construction of charging infrastructure and locking-in and expanding car-based road networks (Orsi 2021).

A sensitivity to the productive aspects of (im)mobility is equally relevant, but less frequently studied, in relation to climate-based displacement. Studies on ‘climate refugees’ assume people are static prior to their forced movement. In contrast, analyses embracing a climate (im)mobilities approach are questioning how climate change is impacting peoples’ existing mobility practices. This is exemplified by Farbotko and Lazrus’s (2012) research on the mobility practices of the people of the low-lying Pacific Island Nation of Tuvalu, which is threatened by sea level rise. Tuvaluans are often constructed as iconic ‘climate refugees’ and stagnant island people, but Farbotko and Lazrus (2012) identified that internal and external mobility is a crucial part of the Tuvaluan seafaring history and identity. Consequently, the risk of climate change is not that supposedly static Tuvaluans will be forced to engage in movement, but instead that the culturally significant physical and imaginative mobilities of Tuvaluan people will be diminished as they will no longer be able to include travel to, from, and across the Tuvaluan Islands.

Additionally, a mobile ontology has oriented research to look at how altering (im)mobility practices impacts people. If movement produces identities, social relations and spaces, then changing movement must alter these things. A dramatic example of this is provided by Ayeb-Karlsson, Kniveton, and Cannon’s (2020) study of the forced internal migration of Bhola Island residents to a poor region of Dhaka following climatic disasters and riverbank erosion in Bangladesh. Ayeb-Karlsson, Kniveton, and Cannon (2020) found that displacement caused trauma and identity loss that created psychological inertia not experienced by other people of similar socio-cultural, economic and legal status, and which in turn contributed to physical immobility. The identification of this complex feedback loop is further evidence of how a mobile ontology is required to detect the significant social impacts of climate-based human movements, and thus why it is an essential theme for climate (im)mobilities research.

3. The politics of climate (im)mobilities

At the heart of much climate (im)mobilities research, and indeed another key theme of it, has been a sensitivity to the power relations that shape and produce climate change-related movement and stasis. Mobilities scholars argue that the ability someone has to move or stay still, their ‘motility’, is shaped by socio-political hierarchies based on class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). As well, motility is relationally produced through (im)mobilities, meaning that the movement of some creates the conditions for the stasis of others. These understandings are often lacking from climate migration research that mostly frames power as a form of distributed capital that ‘climate refugees’ lack (Bettini 2017; Nawrotzki and DeWaard 2018).

The centrality of power to climate mobilities scholarship was evident in Warner and Wiegel’s (2021) examination of climate buffer infrastructure: material projects that attempt to mitigate the outcomes of climate change. Adaptation projects often increase motility for some people by reducing the motility of others who are forced to undertake ‘adaptation project-induced movement’. There are similarities here to what Sheller (2013, 187) describes as the ‘islanding effect’ whereby post-disaster mobility regimes ‘bring highly motile foreign responders and assistance to some of the affected populations, while holding the “internally displaced” in place.’ Thus, climate mobilities research shows how responses to climate change can generate (im)mobility inequalities.

Likewise, the mobility transitions catalysed by the need to reduce greenhouse emissions have been found by mobilities scholars to be shaped by power relations. For example, decisions about what type of city mobilities, and consequently whose mobilities, should be prioritised when mitigating climate change are politically charged (Freudendal-Pedersen 2020). While the push to electrify cars is regularly framed as part of urban decarbonisation, mobilities researchers suggest that in some places this transition is locking in car use and increasing emissions over the long term (Grindsted et al. 2022).

The way that (im)mobility politics (re)create inequalities is evident in Stefan Bouzarovski, Frankowski, and Tirado Herrero’s (2018) research on ‘low-carbon’ gentrification’. In some cities carbon transitions have involved ‘efforts to change the social and spatial composition of urban districts under the pretext of responding to climate change and energy efficiency imperatives’ (Bouzarovski, Frankowski, and Tirado Herrero 2018, 845). This includes city planners and powerbrokers replacing energy inefficient affordable housing with more energy efficient and expensive housing and thus making it more difficult for disadvantaged groups to engage in homemaking-based immobility within urban settings (Bouzarovski, Frankowski, and Tirado Herrero 2018). Thus, regardless of the context, it is essential that research examines the political nature of the nexus between climate change and human (im)mobility.

4. The inter-scalar nature of climate (im)mobilities

The final theme that I identify in extant climate (im)mobilities scholarship is the interconnection of different scales of movement influenced by climate change. Traditional climate migration research rarely meaningfully connects different scales of movement. Parsons (2019, 671) sums this up stating that ‘scholars have struggled, in recent years, to link the subjective, lived experience of climate change migration to the multi-scalar structures – understood here as durable but mobile arrangements of defined components – through which it manifests.’ Mobilities theory has provided an avenue to overcome this scaler separation because it enshrines a sensitivity to the inter-scalar features of movement (Everuss 2021; Sheller and Urry 2016).

This is exemplified by Sheller’s work on mobility justice, which provides a tangible model to examine the interscaler (im)mobility features of climate change. Sheller (2018, 20) highlights how mobility (in)justices flow through fields of action occurring at different scales, ‘often folding them all together or ricocheting across them all’. This means that a relationship established by the politics of climate (im)mobility is not isolated to any one scale. It is simultaneously produced by actions and relations that exist across scales. For example, the ‘low-carbon gentrification’ examined by Bouzarovski, Frankowski, and Tirado Herrero (2018) is occurring simultaneously across meta- and micro- scales. It is the outcome of global pushes to reduce greenhouse emissions interacting with national politics and local interests in transforming urban environments in profitable ways. Thus, an inter-scalar approach is essential to seeing the integrated verticality of ‘low-carbon gentrification’.

It is, however, not just vertical relations that are identified by inter-scalar research as a mobility justice and climate (im)mobilities framework brings to light horizontally connected contexts. For instance, battles over urban mobility access and technology transitions impact levels of greenhouse emissions (Grindsted et al. 2022), and are therefore connected to local climate change mitigation policies in distant parts of the world. For research, the acknowledgment of such material connections between disparate contexts is raising the empirical and ethical requirement to also connect those contexts analytically (Everuss 2019). Thus, as with the other research themes, the inter-scalar formation of climate-based (im)mobilities research is exposing important and unstudied aspects of the way climate change is interacting with human movement.

Conclusion

Research on the human movement motivated by climate change is in a state of flux. There is growing consensus that traditional conceptualisations of the subject – focussing purely on the forced displacement of bounded and static communities – are no longer fit for purpose (e.g. Boas et al. 2018; Parsons 2019; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019). In the search for new frameworks, scholars are increasingly relying on mobilities theory (e.g. Boas, Dahm, and Wrathall 2020; Warner and Wiegel 2021). This article has identified four key research themes that have emerged out of this work. These themes are, (1) the symbolic and imaginative aspects of climate (im)mobilities, which brings into view the significance of how climate migration is represented as well as contexts that are primarily discursively connected to climate change; (2) the way climate (im)mobilities produce identities and social relations, a topic that deepens understandings of the ontological role of climate-related (im)mobilities in constructing sociality; (3) the politics of climate (im)mobilities, from the climate focussed (re)distribution of city space to the differing creation of motility between populations following climatic disasters; and, (4) the inter-scalar nature of climate (im)mobilities, which connects the disparate global contexts of movement and stasis that are influenced by and enact the phenomenon of climate change.

These themes are far from an exhaustive list of topics that ‘climate (im)mobilities’ research has examined, but they do demonstrate how this scholarship is generating new and important knowledge about the complex relationships between climate change and human movement. This notably includes examination of significant and previously understudied topics, such as the large amount of movement internal to countries motivated in part by climate change, and the way existing power structures including those framed by gender and race shape climate (im)mobilties (Cundill, Singh, and Adger 2021). Such understandings are necessary to inform the types of mobility justice interventions that Sheller (2018) proposes, which not only mitigate the detrimental aspects of climate change, but do so in an equitable manner. As stated by Boas and Wiegel (2021, 93), ‘a mobilities perspective helps to signal that there are different types of movements associated with environmental change, requiring a varied response, whilst highlighting how and why some become marginalized in global migration governance frameworks’. The themes identified in this article operationalise Boas and Wiegel’s claim by demonstrating specific ways that mobilities theory is being used to understand how movement and stasis are relevant to climate change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).