Dr. David Durand-Delacre

Climate-related planned relocations are happening globally yet vary significantly. Drawing on diverse case studies, we present a framework to showcase these differences and identify advocacy priorities and research needs across contexts to ensure more consensual and well-supported relocation practices.

As climate change intensifies, scientific and policy discussions increasingly address questions of future habitability and potential population movements. In this perspective, we caution against premature or top-down characterizations of areas as uninhabitable, or portrayals of large-scale climate-induced displacement as inevitable—particularly when the perspectives and preferences of affected populations are excluded. While we recognize the importance of modelling and scenario-building to assess future risks, we argue that such efforts must be grounded in local realities and include diverse forms of knowledge. Habitability is not determined by climate alone, but emerges from intersecting environmental, political, economic, and cultural dynamics—including governance, inequality, and historical injustice. Framings that do not consider this risk producing two problematic outcomes: first, by prematurely defining areas as uninhabitable, they may undermine the legitimacy of in-situ adaptation and the agency of affected communities; second, when modelling or the use of modelling results does not consider local context, it may inadvertently contribute to narratives portraying climate-induced mass displacement as inevitable, reinforcing deterministic understandings of migration and overlooking the complex drivers of mobility and immobility. To counter these risks, we propose five guiding recommendations: (1) avoid declaring hard limits to habitability without inclusive, context-specific assessments; (2) treat model-based projections as possible, not predetermined futures; (3) reject simplistic global North/South assumptions in assessing vulnerability and mobility; (4) uphold people’s right to remain, alongside the right to move; and (5) prioritize investment in in-situ adaptation that addresses structural inequalities. These principles aim to inform more reflexive and justice-oriented approaches to climate mobility and habitability research—approaches that recognize lived experiences, engage diverse knowledge systems, and help secure equitable futures for those most exposed to environmental change.

This report provides insights regarding available evidence of the funding of planned relocation processes in the context of disasters and climate change. The research looked at the 34 planned relocation cases already analyzed in-depth in the Leaving Place, Restoring Home (LPRH) database commissioned by the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) and the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney (2021). Beyond the information already contained in the LPRH database, this research obtained and analyzed information regarding the funding sources, mechanisms, recipients, and allocation of financial resources for all 34 planned relocation cases.

Drylands cover a significant portion of the Earth’s surface and support a large share of the global population. They are particularly vulnerable to climate change due to low and highly variable precipitation, changes in precipitation patterns, drought, and desertification. Historically, human mobility has been a critical adaptive response in drylands, supporting communities to cope with climatic and environmental shocks. We use a systematic review of the case study literature in the Web of Science (1976–2023) to assess the effects of climatic stressors on human (im)mobility in drylands. The keywords we use capture various forms of mobility and immobility (migration, displacement, pastoralism, relocation, and immobility) and climatic stressors (rapid-onset, slow-onset, and climate variability) in the world’s 107 countries that have at least 1% of territory classified as drylands. More than nine in ten (91%) of the papers identified climatic stressors as influencing human mobility and immobility, with 76% finding an increase in mobility and involuntary immobility, compared to 15% reporting a decrease in mobility. Migration is the predominant type of mobility assessed by the literature, with droughts and anomalies in precipitation and temperature being the primary climatic stressors. Rapid-onset stressors are more frequently found to increase displacement than slow-onset stressors or climate variability. Climatic stressors tend to have a stronger impact on human mobility in drylands compared to global analyses, which include non-dryland regions. We also show a deficit of empirical studies on pastoralism and immobility, limited research on the effects of compound events on human (im)mobility, and a disproportionate focus of studies on China, the USA, and Mexico, leaving African and South American dryland regions understudied.

The production of knowledge is a mobile process. Efforts to conceptualise the mobilities of knowledge draw on a wide range of metaphors to conceptualise the ways in which knowledge moves and changes as it moves. In this paper, I present the theoretical origins and methodological implications – often tied to specific disciplines – of concepts in use. I distinguish between sedentarist metaphors (construction, transfer) and mobile metaphors (focusing on translation, contagion, friction, and circulation). I show that, although all these metaphors share a common attention to knowledge as mobile, they are neither synonymous nor interchangeable. They each structure how we think about and research epistemic mobilities in their own way. I find that mobile metaphors in particular are most compatible with, and can contribute to, the development of the mobile ontology that characterises the mobilities turn. I illustrate this using a case study of the epistemic mobilities of the idea of climate migration in the French context. From this example, I draw key lessons for studies of epistemic mobilities. I argue for a diverse, nuanced conceptual vocabulary of epistemic mobilities, leading to a nuanced, relational understanding of space, scale, and how to trace the mobilities of knowledge in practice.