Environmental Mobilities 2: Climate Mobilities’ Progress on the Climate Mobile Subject

Introduction

This report considers conceptual debates in the research subfield of climate mobilities. “Climate mobilities” has only recently become a deployed term in the field of environmental mobilities (Baldwin et al. 2019; Wiegel et al. 2019). Previously chiefly described using variations on the term “climate migration” or “climate-related displacement,” “climate mobilities” is a particular terminology that is now frequently adopted in attempted analyses of climate change–human mobility relations and their effects. Such relations are assumed to be observable at the heart of what is now a distinct—narrower in scope but large in volume—subfield of environmental mobilities.

In this report, “climate mobilities” refers to a widely deployed umbrella term that is now used across diverse research employing diverse methodologies (e.g., Oakes et al. 2023). This umbrella usage has emerged as quite distinct from climate mobilities as a specific theoretical and methodological approach to understanding human mobility and climate change, that draws on the well-established mobilities paradigm in the social sciences (e.g., Hannam et al. 2006). With interdisciplinary roots in sociology and human geography, climate mobilities as a specific theoretical and methodological approach was inspired by critiques of alarmist climate migration discourse and was introduced to enable research that focused on diverse practices, meanings, and power relations of mobilities and immobilities of people, things, and ideas in a changing climate (Baldwin et al. 2019; Parsons 2019; Wiegel et al. 2019; Boas et al. 2022).

This report takes as its first starting point the observation that while the term “climate mobilities” has become widely used, the specific theoretical and methodological climate mobilities approach has not been particularly widely adopted. Further, the terminology the specific approach sought to replace, such as “climate migration” and “climate-related displacement,” remains in high circulation (Durand-Delacre 2022; Mayer 2023). These types of terms, of which there are many variations, are critiqued by some climate mobilities scholars as too narrowly presumptive of climate change–human mobility relations and their effects, both methodologically nationalistic and environmentally deterministic (see Farbotko 2025). Methodological denationalism, established in migration studies but not well-represented across climate mobilities, interrogates rather than reproduces policy categories such as migrant and refugee (Nicholson 2023; Boas et al. 2024; Sim-Sarka 2025). Despite such types of critique, the “climate migrant,” “people displaced in the context of climate change” and associated climate migration and climate displacement terminology, remain very much present. Such terminology is often used together or interchangeably with climate mobilities terminology (e.g., Hoffmann et al. 2023).

Particular conceptualizations of a climate mobile subject persist with terminological choices, such as a climate migrant from the Global South forced to flee a climate disaster. Combined with widely circulating quantitative estimates of the future numbers of climate mobile subjects, expectations continue that such subjects can indeed be identified and counted (Baldwin 2022; Boas et al. 2022). However, there is no count of climate mobile populations in any official statistical reporting of population movements (Baldwin 2022; Nicholson 2023; Mayer 2023; Kelman 2023; Boas et al. 2024).

The second starting point is that climate mobilities has been critiqued as lacking an agreed and workable definition of itself and its subject (Mayer 2023; Nicholson 2023). Four epistemologically distinct approaches to the analysis of climate mobilities can be identified. Some, indeed a great deal, of research posits relations between climate change and human mobility as a self-evident reality. Assuming at the outset that (im)mobility from climate hotspots is climate-driven and is, or will be, readily observable as such, such work is typically focused on different ways to identify and manage climate mobility, such as new legal and policy frameworks (e.g., McLeman 2019). A second type of study positions climate change–human movement relations as difficult to both empirically observe and conceptualize (e.g., Nabong et al. 2023). Such work tends to argue that improvements in theory and methodology will, in time, enable conceptual clarity and convergence between future projections and observations of current conditions, often citing the multiple forces beyond climate that contribute to human mobility and emphasizing the need for improved data (e.g., Oakes et al. 2023; Letta et al. 2024; Cattaneo et al. 2026). In these first and second types of studies in climate mobilities, various quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods are utilized. Power relations, which are central to the mobilities paradigm and were considered as equally central to climate mobilities by those who introduced the term from the mobilities paradigm, are often underexplored (Boas et al. 2022).

Both are critiqued or unsettled by a third type of study, in which climate mobilities are not empirically investigated so much as interrogated for conceptual or representational issues, including how its ideas have power, and travel and operate in media, policy, and other arenas (e.g., Durand-Delacre 2022, 2024; Sakallari 2023; Daoust and Selby 2024; Nash 2024). Such critiques have identified a conceptual challenge that can often be found across the first two approaches: a tendency to declare a lack of conceptual clarity at the outset, before going on to treat climate mobilities as a self-evident reality and/or an empirically observable albeit difficult to identify phenomenon (Kelman 2023; Mayer 2023; Nicholson 2023). A fourth type of study sees climate mobilities knowledge production itself as part of climate mobilities world-making, rather than separate to it, with climate mobilities emerging to be of interest as a set of calculative techniques and the climate migrant subject as a sociopolitical construct (Farbotko 2017; Ayeb-Karlsson et al. 2022; Baldwin and Waters 2025; Dutta 2025). The third and fourth types of studies often help to reveal the implication of climate mobilities in ongoing gendered, colonial and racial power relations, and raise critical questions about the legitimacy of climate mobilities as a space of knowledge and governance (Baldwin 2022; Mayer 2023; Nicholson 2023; Yumagulova et al. 2023; Vigil 2024; Dutta 2025; Turner et al. 2025).

Different epistemological approaches are generally underscored by absence of explication of epistemological differences in relation to other studies, which appears to be stifling interdisciplinary rigour (Jonsson 2023; Kelman 2023). In this report, the focus is on the third and fourth types of studies that critically investigate conceptual issues, that position research itself as integral to the emergence of climate mobilities as a knowledge object, and that are shedding light on whether and how a climate mobile subject can indeed be identified and conceptualized.

Opportunities for improved cross-disciplinary rigour are starting to be identified in this literature (e.g., Parsons 2019; Paerregaard 2025), which does seem vital in an emergent field of research with a multidisciplinary spread across geography, political ecology, mobilities studies, migration studies, climate change science, adaptation science, anthropology, law, philosophy, sociology, and others (Oakes et al. 2023). This paper thus draws on recent insights in climate mobilities research that help to advance theorization of the climate mobile subject, and help to shift climate mobilities as a subfield toward a rigorous interdisciplinarity, with greater focus on keeping power relations visible. It is noted however that much work appears to lie ahead.

Climate Mobilities and Climate Mobile Subjects: Two Distinct Knowledge Objects

Nicholson (2023, 16), in a wide-ranging critique of “climate migration” research, diagnoses it as suffering from significant conceptual issues, particularly “circular reasoning and a cacophony of categories,” that have prevented answering the subfield's two key questions “who is a climate migrant?” and “what is climate migration?” Nicholson considers climate mobilities terminology as little more than a synonym for climate migration and identifies a key issue characterizing the subfield that applies regardless of terminology: an attempt to straddle a significant divide in Eurocentric knowledge systems, that of science on the one hand, and social sciences on the other. Furthermore, Nicholson (2023, 43–44) identifies a tendency for differences across this divide “to be elided in favor of science” and “thus an impoverished understanding of people and society.” Migration theories and mobilities theories have indeed, until quite recently, been poorly accounted for in studies of climate mobilities, contributing to the field's conceptual issues (Jonsson 2023; Kelman 2023). Paerregaard (2025), for example, examines the concept of “tipping point” that exemplifies the epistemological slippage between dominant climate science on the one hand, and migration and mobilities studies on the other. While important in climate science, “tipping point” when applied to human mobilities in a changing climate is argued to be inaccurate, as it leads to an unsubstantiated assumption that migration spins out of control at tipping points, and becomes irreversible (Paerregaard 2025).

In this context, Nicholson makes a key point that fusing knowledges of climate change and human mobility across the science–social science divide is not a straightforward undertaking, and yet much research has proceeded on the assumption that indeed, climate change and human mobility knowledges can be meaningfully and simply combined. Political ecologists are a key exception, having long grappled explicitly with the challenges of straddling science and social science in human mobility contexts, they eschew simple “fusing” of climate change and human mobility knowledges (e.g., Kelley et al. 2022). Political ecology, perhaps most fundamentally, does not single out climate from other environmental dynamics; it does not presuppose the existence and significance of a climate signal in human mobility (Turner et al. 2025). However, other perspectives on climate mobilities have deployed new concepts that approach science and social science as fusing easily. Thus the climate mobile subject becomes very readily, for example, a “climate refugee” or inhabitant of a “climate-migrant slum” (e.g., Smith et al. 2026). Indeed in law, significant energy has been applied to debating “climate refugee” as a pioneering legal concept, one that is seen as important to include in legal systems if these systems are to respond justly to what has been assumed to be an emerging empirically observable population of climate mobile people (e.g., Lister 2014). Contrastingly, if we return to political ecology, climate refugees are as epistemologically meaningless as natural disasters and the “climate-migrant slum” is seen to reproduce problematic stereotypes of, and approaches to governance of, informal settlements and the people who inhabit them (Olarte and Díaz-Márquez 2025). Furthermore, in political ecology, some innovative approaches to climate mobilities exclude the word climate altogether, using alternative conceptualizations such as vulnerability mobilities or cumulative socionatural displacements (Kelley et al. 2022; Kelman 2023). Faber and Schlegel (2017) argue climate vulnerable people who move could just as readily be labelled “neoliberal refugees” as “climate refugees.” Such approaches attempt to expand analytical utility, paying attention to the historical, social, and environmental context in which human movement occurs and refusing to assume the dominance of climate at the outset.

Attempts to deal with the field's conceptual issues often focus more on methodology than disciplinary differences or epistemological issues, which although important, limit the tools with which conceptual challenges can be addressed (Parsons 2019; Turner et al. 2025). Further, the difficulties in rigorously defining climate mobilities seem to be perpetuated by expectations that “who is a climate mobile subject?” and “what is climate mobility?” are indeed mutually compatible research questions. Analyses addressing each with different methodologies are often expected to be able to inform and confirm the other. There are regular assertions, for example, that ethnographic research with climate mobile subjects can support or confirm modelling of climate mobilities, and that fine-scaled qualitative research and large-scaled quantitative research indeed work in complement to provide increasingly sophisticated knowledge of climate mobilities as a single complex reality (Hoffmann et al. 2021; Beyer and Milan 2023; Oakes et al. 2023).

Certain advances in climate mobilities recently, however, are suggesting that climate mobilities and climate mobile subjects might be best approached as different and distinct knowledge objects that do not necessarily work in complement. Multiple methodologies do not necessarily reveal different parts of a coherent whole (Mayer 2023; Baldwin and Waters 2025). Climate mobility, when viewed as a set of calculative techniques linking climate change data and data on movement of people over time, is not discernible as discrete events or population characteristics (Baldwin and Waters 2025). If climate mobilities is a set of calculations of how groups of people might respond to certain risk conditions, then “climate change has fundamental consequences on global environmental systems, [but] it does not directly displace one person from one place to another” (Mayer 2023). Locating something called “climate mobility” in relation to specific persons in the present or in the past is, therefore, according to this type of research, not logically possible. If a human mobility–climate change relation cannot be isolated in a specific individual's life course, climate mobility is not empirically observable in a particular place or at a particular moment. The “climate mobile subject,” therefore, can be examined as a socio-political construct, but does not exist as an observable human embodiment of climate–mobility relations (Mayer 2023). A climate mobile subject, even a self-identified subject, only exists in relation to, rather than objectively separate from, attempts to conceptualize, study, and manage such populations (Farbotko 2017, 2023; Mayer 2023). For example, people living in delta regions who migrate to other areas are often labelled climate migrants in attempts to know and understand something called climate migration, and this label has real consequences, such as the development of climate migrant advocacy or further climate migrant research projects. The climate mobile subject understood as a socio-political construct has taken form as part of responses to the climate emergency rather than a set of empirically observable population characteristics (Baldwin 2022).

Climate mobilities, then, are not the sum of a collection of climate mobile subjects, because even though some migrants might be labelled “climate migrants,” there is also no agreed set of characteristics against which such a label can be measured in relation to specific populations. Climate mobilities and climate mobile subjects are thus starting to be usefully understood not as complementary aspects of one emergent empirical reality, but as two separate knowledge objects that are being problematically fused together in climate mobility world-making, “an arrangement of intuitive propositions that make things happen” (Baldwin and Waters 2025). This understanding moves climate mobilities away from seeking a unified metatheory, instead beginning to acknowledge multiple perspectives that are explicit about, and deployed precisely because of, their diverse and distinct theoretical and methodological parameters.

Put another way, how and with what effects research itself brings “climate migrants” into being is currently an important topic. Climate mobilities is facing a legacy of its own initiation of subjects such as “climate migrants” and “climate refugees” to the intersecting research, policy, and public imaginations (Baldwin 2022; Mayer 2023). Future research will likely theorize the climate mobile subject in more rigorous transdisciplinary endeavors that prioritize explicit engagement with the assumptions, multiple disciplinary influences and methodological opportunities and limitations of climate mobilities broadly defined. A considerable advance of climate mobilities’ terminology is that it could, if delinked from “climate migrant” and variants on it, usefully insist on the field's subject as undetermined at the outset.

A final point is that the field's research-policy interface has long relied on the assumed existence of the climate mobile subject as “climate migrants” or “climate-displaced” people, so if such subjects are removed from research, climate mobilities can be diminished as a topic of policy attention. This appears to be already occurring in some policy arenas (Durand-Delacre 2023, 2024; Schewel 2023; Bettini and Casaglia 2024). In the French national context, for example, climate mobilities is being questioned as a policy issue because conceptual ambiguity has prevented it being translatable into policy-useful measures. The ambiguity of the climate mobile subject is also seen as a barrier to wider climate action agendas (Durand-Delacre 2023, 2024). In the Italian political environment of highly securitized approaches to migration, there is currently a surprising silence on the impact of climate migration on national security (Bettini and Casaglia 2024). Contrastingly, a cohort of Austrian students who were introduced to a fictitious migrant from the African nation of Chad perceived this subject to be legitimate as a political migrant if crossing the border due to climate change, but not if the movement was due to local environmental impacts (Henning et al. 2022). How the climate mobile subject is variously constructed, and in what forms of research and policy, appears to be a crucial question for environmental mobilities going forward.

Conclusion

This paper has examined emergent opportunities in climate mobilities as a subfield with an undetermined subject. As a new, young branch of inquiry that has arisen in the context of the climate crisis, and attempts to govern it, climate mobilities is confronting ongoing critique of the validity and accuracy of the subjects it has introduced, such as “climate displaced persons” and “climate migrants” and many variants thereof. Such terms have become entrenched not only in research but in policy and public discourse. However, climate mobilities is beginning to closely interrogate its conceptual ambiguity that has allowed for the reinforcement of environmentally deterministic and methodologically nationalistic climate mobile subjects.

Climate mobilities appears to be at a critical juncture, coming to terms with the idea that climate mobilities as calculative techniques linking climate change data and data on movement of people does not necessarily map to climate subjects as sociopolitical constructs through which dynamic meanings, identities, and values are narrated and contested. The ongoing appearance of the “climate migrant” and its variants as simultaneously politicized and ambiguous is not solely an issue of terminology, but turning attention to terminology and its role in climate mobilities world-making is helping to progress conceptual rigour. Ultimately, such attention should lead to better support for the vulnerable communities who have been identified as current or future climate mobile subjects, even if “climate migrant” diminishes from an explicit presence in policy agendas. Concepts such as cumulative socio-natural displacements and vulnerability mobilities can help the field to move away from the fusing of climate change and human mobility in simplistic or ambiguous ways. Current research looks likely to help climate mobilities to become a far more rigorous transdisciplinary endeavor that prioritizes explicit engagement with its assumptions, multiple disciplinary influences and methodological opportunities and limitations.