Climate Change and Human Mobility
Global Challenges to the Social Sciences

This book examines general questions and particular cases of climate-change related mobility, and explores their implications for the social sciences.

Kirsten Hastrup (Edited by), Karen Fog Olwig (Edited by)

9781107028210, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 August 2012

276 pages, 9 b/w illus. 3 maps
23.1 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'The greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration', stated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990. Since then there has been considerable concern about the large-scale population movements that might take place because of climate change. This book examines emerging patterns of human mobility in relation to climate change, drawing on a multidisciplinary approach including anthropology and geography. It addresses both larger, general questions and concrete local cases, where the link between climate change and human mobility is manifest and demands attention - empirically, analytically and conceptually. Among the cases explored are both historical and contemporary instances of migration in response to climate change, and together they illustrate the necessity of analyzing new patterns of movement, historic cultural images and regulation practices in the wake of new global processes.

1. Introduction: climate change and human mobility Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Fog Olwig
2. Leaving home: how can historic human movement inform the future? Carole Crumley
3. Inuit and climate change in the prehistoric eastern Arctic: a perspective from Greenland Mikkel Sorensen
4. Dehumanising the uprooted: lessons from Iceland in the Little Ice Age Kirsten Hastrup
5. Relocation of Reef and Atoll Island communities as an adaptation to climate change? Learning from experience in the Solomon Islands Thomas Birk
6. Contextualising links between migration and environmental change in northern Ethiopia James Morrissey
7. On the risks of engineering mobility to reduce vulnerability to climate change: insights from a small island state Jon Barnett
8. Mobility, climate change and social dynamics in the Arctic: the creation of new horizons of expectation and the role of the community Frank Sejersen
9. Land grab in Africa: resilience for whom? Quentin Gausset and Michael Whyte
10. Climate change, migration and Christianity in Oceania Wolfgang Kempf
11. Climate-induced migration and conflict: what are the links? Christian Webersik.

Subject Areas: Social impact of environmental issues [RNT], Human geography [RGC], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]