As part of Cambridge University Green Week, I participated in a panel discussion organised by the Homerton College Environment Society, in partnership with student-led charity SolidariTee (support them if you can!). With Alexander Betts, Chantalle Byron, and Karla Zambrano, we introduced the audience to some of the key analytical, legal, and political considerations to take into account when talking about the relationship between climate change and migration.
David
March 25, 2021
Climate Migration: A Primer in 2 Parts
I wrote a short, two-part piece on climate migration for the Global Human Movement Review, the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement blog. The first piece focuses on some of the misconceptions most commonly perpetuated in media and policy narratives. I emphasise that (1) migration is a multi-causal process that cannot be explained by climate change alone; and that (2) human mobilities take many different forms, not all of which are permanent and linear. I also issue a much needed reminder that (3) most migrants do not cross international borders.
March 24, 2021
Preparing news articles downloaded from Factiva for corpus linguistics analysis in TXM
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, colleagues in the Cambridge Geography Department got together to write a Remote Fieldwork booklet aimed at undergraduate geographers faced with the prospect of researching and writing their final-year dissertations from their desks only. I contributed a short piece on how to integrate corpus linguistic techniques to critical discourse analysis. While it offers some good introductory advice and further reading, it is a little short on the technical details.
March 20, 2021
Participation in Entangled Im/Mobilities Conference (University of Vienna)
On the 19th of March 2021, I participated in a panel on “Mobility Justice? Entangled Im/Mobilities in Climate and Environmental Change”, as part of the Entangled Im/Mobilities Conference 2021: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted by the Research Platform Mobile Cultures and Societies at the University of Vienna. I presented an overview of an upcoming paper, currently under review for a special issue on environmental mobilities in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, on “(Mis-)Representing Climate Mobilities: Lessons from Documentary Filmmaking”.
November 17, 2020
A dialogue on environmental migration with policy-makers
On the 16th of November 2020, I participated in a doctoral workshop organised by the Cité de la Solidarité Internationale (CSI), a research and policy platform based in Annemasse, France. The objective of this meeting, held before an online audience, was to incite dialogue between PhD candidates and practicioners, exploring potential research applications of our theses.
October 7, 2020
On the failings of alarmist headlines
There recently seems to have been a renewed rise in dramatic, alarming narratives about impending mass climate migrations. Concerned about the potentially negative impacts of these reports and the news stories that uncritically relay them, I published a short piece in The Conversation with colleagues Carol Farbotko (University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia), Christiane Froelich (German Institute for Global and Area Studies) and Ingrid Boas (Wageningen University).
September 5, 2020
National baselines for the Sustainable Development Goals assessed in the SDG Index and Dashboards
Abstract: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — agreed in 2015 by all 193 member states of the United Nations and complemented by commitments made in the Paris Agreement — map out a broad spectrum of economic, social and environmental objectives to be achieved by 2030. Reaching these goals will require deep transformations in every country, as well as major efforts in monitoring and measuring progress. Here we introduce the SDG
September 5, 2020
Climate Migration Myths
Abstract: Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change. Boas, I., Farbotko, C., Adams, H., Sterly, H., Bush, S., Geest, K. van der, Wiegel, H., Ashraf, H., Baldwin, A., Bettini, G., Blondin, S.,