TransRe Working Group

Allgemeine Informationen

Climate change and migration are drawing increasing interest from researchers and policy makers, as well as from the general public. Much attention has been given to climate change as a push factor contributing to migration, and to the potential conflicts and humanitarian crises that may result. The proposed project offers a fresh perspective on the climate change-migration nexus. It starts from the assumption that, regardless of the accuracy of the projections of future environmental changes, migration is already occurring and will continue to be a major dynamic of global change. Migration is connecting people, transforming places, and facilitating flows of knowledge and resources, and thus creating networked and interconnected translocal spaces. Through this intensifying translocal connectedness, the ability of households and communities to respond to climatic risks and sustain their livelihoods and well-being – that is, their social resilience – has the potential to be strengthened. The proposed project focuses on resource-dependent households and rural communities that are particularly vulnerable to climate-related risks. It seeks to decipher the relations between migration, translocality and social resilience to climate change. It follows a place-based and multi-sited fieldwork approach and seeks to generate empirical evidence based on case studies carried out in Thailand and in the places of destination of migrants.

The research program will employ various approaches from the fields of Development Geography, Geographic Migration Studies, Political Geography and Anthropology.