HABITABLE at the 2023 Adaptation Futures Conference

The HABITABLE team and project partners joined the seventh edition of the Adaptation Futures international conference which took place in Montreal, Canada, from October 2-6 2023.

The conference aimed to push for the adoption of transformative adaptation for long-term resilience, bring marginalized voices, especially indigenous people from the Global South, to the forefront in pursue of climate justice, equity, diversity and accelerating momentum towards the Global Goal on Adaptation and the Global Stocktake and build on action to implement effective adaptation.

The HABITABLE team participated in the Compounding risks and vulnerability – What are the implication for habitability and migration? Insights from research and practice panel. This discussion raised questions on the the concept of “habitability” and how perceptions of climate-related risks influence individuals’ final decision to migrate. (Pictures from the panel discussion are embedded below)

In addition to the HABITABLE team, HABITABLE project partners Dr. Neil Adger and Dr. Ricardo Safra de Campos participated in the Adaptation Futures Conference 2023 in Montreal, Canada. More information on their panel discussions are listed below.

Dr. Neil Adger 

1. Incorporating health and well-being into climate adaptation actions 

Responses to climate change risks have diverse consequences for dimensions of well-being and dimensions of health. Well-being includes safety, place, self and belonging. Both multi-dimensional well-being and the physical and mental dimensions of health and ill-health are under-accounted for outcomes from adaptation interventions and actions. These are key issues for the Making Adaptation Choices theme of the conference. This session therefore presents new knowledge from across multiple disciplines on new measures, new methods, and new findings on how to account for the health and well-being consequences of adaptation, over and above the simple observation that adaptations that draw down climate risk avoid some of the negative consequences of impacts. The various research present uses both observational and action and co-creation techniques across the social and health sciences to seek to make adaptation assessments comprehensive and inclusive of diverse knowledge.

Dr. Ricardo Safra de Campos 

1. Migration and climate change: understanding decisions and evaluating outcomes 

Globally, populations are moving in response to a broad range of drivers. Such movements occur over a continuum ranging from temporary moves to more permanent relocations. Though the impacts of climate change are now identified as one of the key drivers of migration and displacement, knowledge on the interaction between migration decisions and outcomes remain uneven. Through a combination of empirical and conceptual studies, this session explores how human migration at different spatial and social scales is deployed as adaptation strategy to environmental stressors.

2. Climate justice perspectives on planned relocation 

Planned relocations are often deployed as a measure of last resort after in-place adaptation and resilience-building measures have been exhausted. But as climate change impacts become more frequent and intense, authorities and communities have increasingly been seeking to minimize harm to people living in unsafe places by moving them to areas with lower exposure. These recent relocations build on decades of development-related displacement, moving settlements and people to make way for urban development, dams and roads. These initiatives have, however, been widely shown to exacerbate inequalities, leading to unjust and uncertain outcomes among relocated communities without legitimate processes. Processes of planned relocation raise questions about the scope of local and national governments’ responsibility for helping people to move out of harm’s way and settle in a safer location. Institutional responses at national level have been facilitating the movement of vulnerable populations out of at-risk areas, but there is an ongoing uncertainty as to whether these relocation practices do in fact promote equality, fairness and resilience in the affected communities. In this session, we consider the process of planned relocation and issues of climate justice across stakeholder groups and consider government, media and resident framings and experience of relocation processes. Drawing on empirical studies, we explore the types of institutional and governance innovations required to move from relocation as ad hoc reactive solutions to anticipatory and managed adaptation strategies, we examine the role of the media in shaping discourses on planned relocation and we provide insights into policy design and implementation of planned relocation in response to environmental stressors. We present and put in dialogue case studies from both the Global North (Italy) and the Global South (Bangladesh and India) and focus on different drivers of relocation, including coastal and riverine flooding, coastal erosion and cyclones.