(Im)mobilities & climate Change: Locating environmental immobility in theory and in practice

Thus far, most research on the human impacts of climate change has focused on the people displaced, who have come to incarnate the human faces of global warming (Gemenne 2011). However, the people who face the same adverse conditions, but who stay in communities of origin have been relegated to the academic and political backburner. Only recently have scholars noted that ‘in the decades ahead millions of people will be unable to move away from locations in which they are extremely vulnerable to environmental change’, becoming trapped populations (Foresight 2011).
While those ‘trapped’ or who choose to stay in areas affected by climate change represent a substantial policy issue, there is little empirical work specifically targeting such populations. The scant attention that is afforded to immobility emphasises financial constraints as drivers of immobility (Zickgraf 2018). In other words, it is frequently assumed that people facing climate change yet who do not leave simply cannot afford to move. As an essential part of the mobility spectrum, the complexity of immobility in crisis, including its social and political dimensions, warrants thorough investigation.
In response to these research gaps, from 2015 to 2018, the IMMOBILE project asked why people become (or remain) immobile in the face of climatic and environmental change and then articulated the relationship between migration, on one hand, and immobility, on the other. This contribution locates environmental immobility within mobilities studies, its conceptual complexities, and, finally, illustrates these issues with the findings of the IMMOBILE project. The findings are based on 160 semi-structured interviews conducted in three developing countries experiencing environmental degradation (including but not limited to the impacts of climate change): Senegal, Comoros, and Viet Nam. The presentation delves into the nature of (im)mobility patterns and outcomes as they interact with social, political, economic, environmental and demographic forces. In political spaces that are dominated by a desire to limit human mobility and reinforce sedentary biases, we underline the effects of these discourses, policies, and programmes on people’s aspirations and abilities to migrate out of harm’s way.