The Research problem
The climate emergency presents challenges for local communities in adapting to environmental changes affecting their livelihoods and wellbeing. Adaptation in the Global South is shaped by historical conditions of vulnerability and fundamentally depends on spatial mobility or immobility, often associated with exposure to environmental risks as well as water and food insecurity. Empirical studies have not yet been able to determine how population mobility responds to high vulnerability and limited adaptation capacity to climate change. Such responses are context-specific and contingent upon multiple dimensions involving social, environmental, economic, demographic, cultural, and political factors.
For the most vulnerable, displacement, migration, and relocation are often crucial strategies for adaptating to climate change. Although migration and displacement are most commonly examined as impacts of environmental change, the most vulnerable people are not necessarily the ones most likely to migrate, as they may lack the means to move at all therefore requiring support for relocation from governments. Rather than looking for an all-encompassing theory, our goal is to investigate the contexts that may, to some degree, represent the realities that are experienced by vulnerable populations in the Global South.
Research Design
Our goal is to investigate contexts that may, to some extent, represent the realities that are experienced by vulnerable populations in the Global South. The case studies will focus on riverine and indigenous populations in the Brazilian Amazon (Alto Solimões and Javari Valley regions), relocated communities in low-lying areas of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) Delta in Bangladesh, and fishing and farming communities in the Volta Delta, Ghana. This project will synthesize findings from existing primary datasets into a peer-reviewed journal article and conference papers. We will also design a larger comparative project involving a new survey methodology (both quantitative and qualitative) to enhance current understanding of mobility as a response to climate change. We will pre-test the qualitative component of the survey (semi-structured interview) in the Volta Delta.
Our network will benefit from previous collaborations between universities and their researchers involved in the project. It consists of an interdisciplinary team of researchers with experience in designing, implementing and analysing case study surveys on population vulnerability, environmental change and demographic dynamics, particularly mobility, in the Global South. The interactions within our network will be mainly online with one in-person meeting in Vienna.
Project Objectives
This project integrates climate justice into the climate mobility research agenda through two interconnected objectives:(i) learning from prior empirical studies on some of the most vulnerable populations in Global South, and (ii) identifying key points for the inclusion of climate mobility as a cross-cutting axis in the construction of local and national adaptation plans. We will have support from WUN for a in-person team meeting and the pre-testing of a qualitative survey in the Volta Delta, Ghana, both in the second half of 2025.