Immobility: The neglected flipside of the climate displacement crisis
By Kira Walker
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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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