Climate Mobility, Onward Precarity and Urban Environment (CEMENT)

Our understanding of 'climate mobility' is changing. 'Climate mobility' means both voluntary and involuntary, multidirectional movement of people, including an act of not moving, for reasons related to climate change, whereas 'climate migration' generally means the permanent change of residence from one country to another.

Much scientific research suggests that climate mobility is largely in-country, heading to cities from climate-affected rural areas, and not necessarily permanent. Yet, climate change-induced mass migration from the Global South to the Global North (e.g. Africa to Europe) continues to be frequent in new reports and development policy and practice.

Moreover, despite popular assumptions, climate mobility is usually not only about climate change. Even in climate change hotspots in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, climate change is rarely the main reason for mobility. Climate change affects human mobility mostly indirectly through other social, economic and political conditions (e.g. infant mortality rate, food price inflation, unemployment rate etc.) that together affect mobility decision-making processes.

My recent comprehensive review of academic and policy research shows that much scientific research a) continues to consider climate change as a main driver of mobility, b) is rooted in the notion of location-based push and pull factors, c) pays less attention to family life, mobility decision-making and structures of society, d) focuses on working-age males in single locations and their economic activities, and e) is geographically biased to either climate change affected rural areas or social inequalities and economic uncertainties in destination areas.

The Climate Mobility, Onward Precarity and Urban Environment (CEMENT) project will examine these issues by studying climate mobility in terms of family decision-making, social inequality and economic uncertainties, with Ethiopia as the test case. Through a life course, multi-sited, gender-responsive and age-sensitive investigation of climate mobility practices, CEMENT will explore a) how smallholder families make mobility decisions of different family members in response to increasingly frequent and intense drought events in rural Ethiopia and b) how those individual family members navigate opportunities and challenges in urban Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is an important site to study as it is a) a country with increasingly frequent and intense drought events, b) the second largest populated country in Africa, c) predominantly rural but with one of the fastest urbanisation rates of about 5% a year and double-digit annual GDP growth, and d) the third-top recipient of the EU Emergency Trust Fund (EUTF) for Africa and received a total amount of 311 million Euro over the last six years to reduce the arrival of migrants and refugees in Europe.