Climate Change and Human Mobility

April 12-14, 2010 - University of Copenhagen, Department of Anthropology

The conference aimed at investigating the practices and wider implications of human mobility in recognition of the fact that environmental change has become a truly global issue. With the current trends of climate change, new patterns of regional migration emerge in terms of a forced flight from flooded or dried up environments, and in terms of active, adaptive strategies.

The conference focused on emerging patterns of human mobility in relation to environmental change from an interdisciplinary approach, with the general ambition to identify the complex patterns of causality inhering in human migration, and to highlight the range of human capacities for responding to environmental challenge.

Among the areas explored were lessons from pre-historical and historical cases of migration, cultural and literary images of environmental crisis and social response, local social imaginaries, scales of mobility, and the new role for scholarship or other all-pervasive catastrophes at the beginning of times. Case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Pacific and the Circum-Polar area were presented, and provided examples of the various impacts climate changes have on human mobility in the different regions.

Conference Report
Programme and abstracts
List of participants
Further information www.climatemobility.ku.dk