Immobility: The neglected flipside of the climate displacement crisis

As climate change-related disasters become ever more common, they have given rise to increasingly dire warnings about impending mass migration by those displaced. This tendency to focus on movement has largely, if unintentionally, obscured an equally important question: why people don’t move.

An emerging group of experts is arguing that dominant narratives around climate migration – focused on doomsday scenarios of large numbers of people relocating from the Global South to the Global North – contain significant blind spots, often overlooking some of the most vulnerable people.

For millions around the world, climate displacement is already a reality, and at a climate summit last week hosted by the United States, world leaders pledged to increase funding to developing countries to help them adapt to the effects of a changing climate.

In the six months between September 2020 and March 2021, more than 10.3 million people were displaced by extreme weather and natural disasters mainly related to the climate – by far the leading cause of displacement around the world. And climate change is exacerbating other causes of displacement, including poverty, food insecurity, and water shortages.

For every displaced person who ventures toward the Global North, vastly more move within or between countries in the Global South, or remain immobile in areas where climate change is making life increasingly precarious.

“Climate mobility and immobility are not separate things; they are two sides of the same coin,” Caroline Zickgraf, deputy director of the Hugo Observatory at Belgium’s University of Liège – a research centre focusing on the intersection of environmental change, migration, and politics – told The New Humanitarian.

But relative to mobility, comparatively little is known about immobility in the context of climate change because, until recently, it was not a topic many researchers were paying attention to.

“We don’t have statistics about climate immobility like we do for migration,” Zickgraf said. “We can’t simply point to the number of people living in climate hotspots, because that doesn’t tell us anything about who they are, what factors influence their immobility, how many chose to stay, or how many had no other choice.”

Climate immobility can be involuntary (people aspiring to leave but lacking the capability to do so), or it can be voluntary (people choosing to remain despite the risks).

Involuntary immobile populations are often among the most vulnerable because they are unable to escape the sudden and direct impacts of climate disasters and often don’t have the resources to build resilience while facing poverty, food insecurity, and conflicts compounded by climate change.

Understanding the specifics of people’s vulnerabilities, what influences their decision-making processes, and the impacts of those decisions are all areas that deserve more attention.

“While most policymakers are focused on the ‘problem’ of climate migration, we’re still trying to convince people that the presence of immobility doesn’t mean the absence of vulnerability,” Zickgraf said.

According to Joseph Kofi Teye, director of the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Ghana, international organisations and researchers often incorrectly assume that people who don’t migrate have successfully adopted adaptation measures where they live.

But climate immobility has numerous causes, ranging from lack of money and poor health to the absence of information about how to migrate.

“Involuntary immobility is a policy concern because these are people who need to go, want to go, but who are unable to do so,” said Zickgraf. “They’re effectively trapped.”

Teye said he had encountered involuntary climate immobility in his migration research in northern Ghana and the country’s coastal savannah zone, telling The New Humanitarian: “Many of the very poor households who don’t have resources and networks to migrate are forced to remain in a place that’s facing serious climate change [impacts], especially drought and food insecurity.”

Inequalities related to gender, age, and class; cultural norms; and patriarchal traditions all influence immobility and contribute to women and the elderly being more immobile than men, Teye added.

At the same time, not everyone living in areas affected by climate change wants to migrate. Many people choose to stay despite growing climate risks because of a historical and spiritual attachment to place, a sense of identity and belonging, or a desire for self-determination.

This is the case in the Pacific Islands, which are extremely vulnerable to climate change impacts like sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and more intense cyclones.

“Pacific Island people have long been subjected to ‘inevitable displacement’ narratives,” said Carol Farbotko, adjunct research fellow at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. “Immobility is a way of framing resistance to the idea that displacement from their Indigenous places is a foregone conclusion.”

“There is a holistic connection between people, their ancestors, and their environment in many parts of the Pacific that cannot be measured in economic terms,” Farbotko added.

For Kayly Ober, who runs Refugee International’s Climate Displacement Program, the inability to conceptualise the idea of immobility contributes to the blind spot surrounding it.

“Most development policy views migration as a negative outcome, a failure of… interventions,” she said. Conversely, “practitioners view those that we might categorise as ‘immobile’ as simply people who live in a particular place and that may just need resources and capacities to enable their progress in those places.”

Because climate immobility is a relatively new area of research, specific policies are not yet being implemented to address it, according to Ober.

Existing policies related to disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and resilience building overlap with climate immobility but don’t address it explicitly as an independent phenomenon, she added.

Experts like Farbotko argue that the onus is on governments and donors to co-develop programmes and policies that can help individuals and communities who choose not to migrate achieve a reasonable quality of life where they are – through adaptation measures.

Pacific Island nations stand out for being ahead of the curve by developing innovative national policies to support vulnerable coastal communities, most of whom prefer to remain for the time-being