1. Introduction

At the second edition of the specialised conference on “environmental and climate mobilities” (ECMN) held in July 2024 at the University of Liège, Mohamed Nasheed, former President of the Maldives and Secretary General of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (an international partnership of 68 countries in the Global South particularly exposed to the effects of climate change), voiced a strong critique stating that European and Global North universities are now—quite suddenly—interested in the issue of so-called climate migration as a result of geopolitical interests seeking to understand how best to curtail migration fearing especially potential migration from the Global South. Mohamed Nasheed hinted, in a few words, at fundamental epistemological and ethical questions: what power relationships underpin research on climate-related mobilities? Whose knowledge interests are being answered? And one could add, how is this emerging field situated within migration studies at large and what does it reveal? This article offers to explore such questions through a reflection on the epistemological stakes underpinned by a shift in the perspective from dominant accounts of migration to the potential contributions of a political ecology lens, arguing that rather than discarding research endeavours on these topics it matters to ask the “how” and “why” questions.

The issue of so-called environmental or climate migration has been quite visible and often depicted in an alarmist tone to the general public through the media and in the spheres of politics, resonating with Mohamed Nasheed’s points made above, while actually remaining at the margins of migration studies up until recent years.¹ Among the often-cited figures is the one provided by the World Bank which estimates that climate change will force 216 million people to become internally displaced by 2050 in its famous Groundswell report published in 2018 and updated in 2021 (Clement et al., 2021). Media accounts have also reported on far higher estimates, e.g. the figures foregrounded by Australian think tank Institute for Economics and Peace in 2020 stating that 1.2 billion people are at risk of being displaced by 2050.² However, researchers from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have little confidence in quantitative projections. Although the displacement of a growing number of people has been recognised as a likely consequence of climate change by the IPCC since 1990 and continues to be mentioned in subsequent reports (e.g. IPCC, 2014; IPCC, 2022), modelling climate migration, particularly at the global level, remains a difficult and hardly reliable exercise. This is all the more the case that environmental factors remain invisible within most administrative and statistical systems dealing with international migration, since people who move, once they cross national state borders, become migrant workers, asylum seekers or people in an irregular administrative situation. Yet as the ecological and material consequences of climate changes across the globe become undeniable, it is increasingly problematic to rely almost systematically on state categories to make sense of contemporary migrations. The underlying hypothesis here is hence that it might be the case that it is not only because of the complexity of the issue and prevalence of internal mobility (as is also the case for other types of mobilities) that little attention has been dedicated to the implications of cross-border climate-related migration. The reluctance might in part owe to the important policy and political challenges this question raises, and on the part of Global North states, indeed a certain preference for disregarding the articulation of internal and international migration against the background of current political contexts of high politicization of migration issues, growing anti-immigration sentiments and the rise and access to power of far-right political formations.

If anything, this context should urge us to think about alternatives to account for migration beyond methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002), carving out space for methodological de-nationalism (Anderson, 2019). The question of how to study the environmental factors of migration and its connections to climate changes pertains to this endeavour, all the more that the field of migration studies has long ignored environmental factors, favouring economic perspectives whose mainstream tenets dedicated little conceptual attention for instance to land (Obeng-Odoom, 2022) or food (Carney, 2014, 2024) in relation to migration. Political ecology hence represents a marginal perspective in contemporary migration studies (Vigil, 2024). This article argues for a political ecology of migration starting with a brief review of dominant migration theoretical models and categories and a call for embedding intersectionality in this endeavour. Neither the environment nor climate-related degradations feature within the main theoretical models of migration, whether they are liberal in inspiration and present migration as guided by the optimisation of income and leading to the reduction of global inequalities, or whether they stem from a Marxian political economy perspective and present migration as resulting from the needs of economically dominant countries (in the core of capitalism) to the detriment of the interests of labour-supplying countries (in the peripheries). While the “reflexive turn” in migration studies (Amelina, 2021) called for a critical assessment of the use of state-determined migration categories in migration research (Dahinden, 2016), the ways in which political ecology could achieve that and related implications for migration studies represent a stimulating emerging conversation, yet little engaged with within European migration studies (pioneering elaborations include: Vigil, 2016, 2024; Carney, 2014, 2024; Avallone, 2024; Obeng-Odoom, 2022). This article argues that a political ecology perspective is central to revisiting dominant categories within migration studies, such as the binary of voluntary economic migrants vs. forced political refugees, which continues to feature prominently and to be reproduced across the field. It is, in fact, not only about achieving greater attention to the environmental factors of migration. While this can constitute a starting point, the arguments developed here might also suggest revisiting our understanding of contemporary migrations in the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016) amidst a global ecological crisis.

In doing so, it is key to engage in a fruitful dialogue with intersectional approaches to migration, in an attempt to avoid reproducing the partial and notably gender-indifferent understanding of migration that prevailed in European migration studies until the early 1980s. Developing further recent interventions calling for a feminist political ecology of migration (Vigil, 2024), this article argues that the analytical attention to gender needs to be broadened to intersectionality in order to include contributions from critical race studies, as representations of climate migration are permeated with dynamics of racialisation (Baldwin, 2022). An intersectional approach centres analytically individuals’ and communities’ social positions within entangled layers of domination, such as patriarchy, racism, nationalism and ableism. Engagement with intersectionality beyond a focus on gender, when articulated with the contributions of critical race studies and an epistemological commitment to social justice (Bilge, 2013; Raghuram & Sondhi, 2024), allows for the bridging of multiple levels of analysis, making space for both the complexity of migration and critical theorisations. An intersectional perspective provides the heuristic tools to overcome the pitfalls underlying the figures of the “climate refugee” as well as that of the “environmental migrant,” with racialised men depicted as threats, and racialised women reduced to passive and voiceless victims, both figures engendering racialised othering and feeding into growing anti-immigration rhetoric in the global North. In response, thinking about the environmental factors of migration from an intersectional political ecology makes it possible to grasp in a single movement the need both not to neglect the political dimensions of climate realities in the age of the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016) as well as not to lose sight of the perspectives of migrant persons themselves, grounded in intersectional configurations of power, and who articulate divergent narratives and choices depending on the context, transcending the ideal-type of both the climate refugee and the environmental migrant. This article hence argues for the need to politicise the environmental and climatic causes and dimensions of migration through the lens of political ecology, while being attentive to the intersectional inequalities that run through and shape migration experiences.

To do so, this article first points to the ways in which dominant categories in the field of migration studies are reductive, in order to establish the need to take environmental factors into account in an era of accelerating climate changes, as a starting point for potential paradigm changes. Next, the reasons for the relative silence of migration studies around the environment are explored, while briefly reviewing some of the consolidated knowledge around climate-related internal mobilities, in particular from a gendered perspective. The section yet simultaneously interrogates the limited research conducted into climate-related international migration, whereby policy and political considerations might have underpinned lesser exploration of the articulation of internal and international movements. Finally, the third section proposes to bridge political ecology perspectives with intersectional lenses—attentive to the class dimensions of land dispossession, to gender inequalities as well as to the workings of racist hierarchies—for the purpose of researching climate-related migration without neither depoliticizing it through climate reductionism nor politicising it in abstract terms, as if untethered from the intersectional power relations that underpin it.

2. Dominant Migration Categories and Theories: Epistemological Stakes in Engaging with Climate

The scepticism around the notion of “climate migration” is scientifically absolutely legitimate as multi-causality and complexity need to be acknowledged and considering “migrations in the context of climate changes” seems more appropriate. It appears nevertheless that when state categories are mobilised in migration studies, they tend to face less scepticism and are easily “naturalised,” in spite of their equally partial rendering of a migrant person’s experience. It has been by now largely demonstrated for instance that the experiences and trajectories of people in migration situations go beyond the reductive binary of economic vs. political migrants (i.e. asylum seekers and refugees), as countless studies have shown (see for instance Schmoll et al., 2015; Akoka, 2020). Conversely, seeking international protection as an asylum seeker is attached to the notion of forced migration, compelled by circumstances that must be considered political within dominant frames, while gender-based violence struggles to be acknowledged as such because of the androcentric logic underpinning asylum rights (Sahraoui & Freedman, 2022). Despite this, the field remains broadly structured around this fundamental differentiation between research on migration experiences on the one hand (in all their diversity) and research on asylum on the other (from the regimes derived from the 1951 Geneva Convention to the various subsidiary protection statuses that have multiplied and are governed by national law) (see Stierl, 2022). The field of migration studies thus contributes to perpetuating this binary by mobilising the categories used by states (Dahinden, Fischer, & Menet, 2021), thereby marginalising what national and international administrations have not yet recognised as an empirical reality. Abdelmalek Sayad, the sociologist of Algerian immigration to France, had already emphasised the structuring nature of state thinking on immigration in that the categories used to think about immigration are eminently “national” categories (Sayad, 1999). Taking environmental factors into account, not as just another factor, but as a dimension that leads us to rethink contemporary migration from a political ecology perspective, can help to question the reproduction of administrative and bureaucratic categories in knowledge production, increasingly criticised in reflexive approaches to migration (Raghuram, 2021).

This matters also because discursive tropes stemming from the binary logic of economic vs political migration have underpinned political discourse for several decades in Europe, becoming more pronounced as border militarisation has increased. To mention but one example, Gérald Darmanin, former Minister of the Interior in France, stated in September 2023, in the context of the arrival of several thousand people on the Italian island of Lampedusa: “Our desire is, of course, to welcome those who need to be welcomed, those who are politically persecuted, but we must absolutely send home those who have no business being in Europe.”³ The operationalisation of the opposition between the figures of an undeserving “economic migrant” and of a deserving “political refugee,” although it cannot account for the complexity of contemporary migrations, continues to justify, even legitimise, policies that expose migrant persons to death, or in the words of Vicky Squire (2017), to a government of migration through death. A deadly logic, fundamentally necropolitical (Mbembe, 2006), has in fact governed the management of Europe’s external borders for just over three decades and has led to more than 33,000 documented deaths at Europe’s Mediterranean borders since 2014 (IOM, 2026). These deaths are put at a distance when interpreted as the result of the individual, free and presumed uncoerced initiative of people who embark on unauthorised migration, often discursively reduced to a quest for economic gain. This moral economy—opposing refugees’ unvoluntary movement and migrants’ supposed voluntariness—underpins a system of triage between those considered worthy of protection and those who bear responsibility for their migration and, consequently, in the context of border militarisation, potentially for their own disappearance. It is thus becoming increasingly problematic to continue to use only the dominant categories of economic and political migration in a world where the ecological and material consequences of climate changes are becoming increasingly tangible.

The significance of these categorisations also transpires in the fact that climate was not taken into account in the main theoretical models of migration, whether they were liberal in inspiration and presented migration as driven by income optimisation and leading to a reduction in inequalities, or whether they stemmed from a Marxian political economy perspective and presented migration as resulting from the needs of economically dominant countries to the detriment of the interests of labour-supplying countries (for an overview of these theories, see De Haas, Castles, & Miller, 2019). While reviewing all existing migration theories lies beyond the scope of this article, I here briefly sketch out some central theoretical tenets of mainstream migration theories in order to foreground the implications of the proposed shifts. Neoclassical approaches are rooted in the figure of the rational actor (in the economic sphere), whether the actor is an individual or the household or family unit of analysis (as in new economics of labour migration), in order to explain migration as a risk-reduction strategy through the diversification of income sources. Authors inspired by Marxian interpretations, on the other hand, emphasise the structural dimension of power relations and the subordination of countries on the periphery of the world system to the countries dominating the global economic order (Wallerstein, 1990).

To provide an example of how these theories can be mobilised, post-World-War II significant labour migrations to Europe are for instance always referred to under the label of economic migration. The notion of economic migration is fully in line with a neoliberal understanding of political economy, underpinned by the idea of voluntary and chosen migration, defined as being guided by the desire to improve one’s (or one’s family) standard of living. While driven by economic growth in several West European countries such as the UK, France and Germany, these migrations were actively sought after by European recruiters seconded by official bilateral agreements, with migrant workers often knowing very little about what was awaiting them. To take but one example, in the case of Turkish emigrants to Germany, surveys conducted in the 1960s have shown that most of those leaving were actually in employment (including as teachers, artisans, shopkeepers or in the agricultural sector) and faced harsher employment conditions in Germany than expected, including for a significant number of workers risky labour in the depth of Germany’s coal mines, yet the wage differential made it possible to send remittances and explained why most would remain (Abadan-Unat, 2011). Although these migrations can be read as fulfilling an economic imperative at individual and household levels, Marxian perspectives highlight that they owed more to structural factors engendered by core-periphery dependencies than to the exercise of unconstrained individual agency in performing rational cost-benefit calculations. From this perspective, the use of migrant workers during the post-war years of sustained economic growth in western Europe was a means of extracting labour for the purpose of capital accumulation. Hence, while they arrive at diametrically opposed analytical conclusions, with migration leading either to a reduction or to an increase in global inequalities, both models give nevertheless analytical primacy to the economic paradigm.

3. Environmental Factors of Migration Making an Entrance in the Field of Migration Studies

Environmental factors have thus received little attention, if any, in the interdisciplinary field of migration studies for several decades. Etienne Piguet (2013) documents the disappearance of “the environment” from the field of migration studies despite its mention in Ravenstein’s laws of migration published at the end of the 19^th century. Piguet then identifies a resurgence in the wake of growing awareness of the effects of anthropogenic climate change from the 1980s onwards, initially in grey literature, particularly in reports by international organisations—starting with the famous report by Essam El-Hinnawi for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which draws attention to “environmental refugees” defined as “people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardised their existence and/or seriously affected their quality of life” (El-Hinnawi, 1985, p. 4)—and more recently, over the last two decades, in a growing number of academic publications, with the publication of a handbook representing a milestone in this regard (see McLeman & Gemenne, 2018).

As many political ecologists have argued (e.g. Villalba, 2008; Escobar, 2014), the ecological crisis, owing to its existential ramifications, requires no less than a revision of fundamental paradigms in the social sciences. Against this background, the environment is gradually re-entering the field of migration studies, starting in the early 21st century, driven by growing interest in these issues from the policy field at the international level, notably the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (Hall, 2016). The issue is still far from central to migration studies but is returning “through the back door,” to use Etienne Piguet’s expression (2013), in the wake of such growing interest from international bureaucrats as well as media coverage that borrows from alarmist rhetoric. In response to criticism that the concepts of “environmental migrant” and “climate refugee” potentially promote a certain climate determinism or reductionism, there is now a strong consensus in this emerging field, while the terminology itself remains debated, that the role of environmental factors cannot be isolated and that experiences of mobility and migration, like those of immobility, are necessarily the result of a combination of various factors (Piguet, Pécoud, & De Guchteneire, 2011) as well as of subjective elements (Gemenne et al., 2017). As the field is expanding but has at times developed in separated strands—for instance not having fully taken on board the contributions of intersectionality—there remains an epistemological challenge in taking into account the articulation of social, political, economic and ecological issues, in order to move beyond the previously dominant frameworks in migration studies that ignore this change of era.

Research into environmental factors initially focused on internal displacement, for which there exist quantitative data compiled by the IDCM (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre) on displacement caused by armed conflict and sudden and gradual environmental disasters. According to the IDMC, 75.9 million people were internally displaced at the end of 2023 (IDMC, 2024). However, the slow-onset effects of climate change remain difficult to grasp, both internally and internationally. Many qualitative case studies on internal migration present it as an adaptation strategy (for example Gentle et al., 2018; Perumal, 2018), which resonates with the frame of “migration as adaptation” to climate change promoted by international and transnational actors, most notoriously the IOM. While case-studies have been conducted virtually across all continents, quantitatively many of these studies concern the Asian continent, particularly Bangladesh and India (Hans et al., 2021), focusing on the consequences of sea level rise in Bangladesh (e.g. Ahmed & Eklund, 2021) and flooding in India (e.g. Patel & Giri, 2019). Several others concern drought and desertification in Africa, for example in central Morocco (Najjar et al., 2017) or northern Mali (Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011). In terms of gendered analysis, many case-studies on climate-related internal mobilities tend to document men’s (for instance Wrigley-Asante et al., 2019; Rao et al., 2020) and young people’s outmigration (for instance Baez et al., 2017), with lesser mobility for women (Bhattarai et al., 2015; Ylipaa et al., 2019; Akinbami, 2021; Ahmed, Eklund, & Kiester, 2023). While women’s mobility is overall less frequent, it is nevertheless documented by several studies (see for instance Evertsen & van der Geest, 2020), especially in the case of younger women (e.g. Hazra et al., 2021). Numerous publications highlight a pattern of internal migration of men from rural to urban areas as a strategy for risk reduction and income diversification (see for instance Irudaya Rajan & Bhagat, 2017; Sugden et al., 2014). The results presented in these studies also highlight the increased responsibilities, particularly agricultural, that fell on women’s shoulders in the context of men’s outmigration (for instance Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011; Nizami & Ali, 2017; Banerjee et al., 2019) and foreground at times explicitly negative consequences of these mobility patterns for women who did not migrate (Vinke et al., 2022).

While there is now ample evidence documenting climate-related internal mobilities, research on international migration linked to climatic and environmental changes remains comparatively scarce. This imbalance partly reflects the empirical reality that most migration—whether climate-related or not—tends to begin with movements over short distances, often within national borders. Yet connections to international migration seem underexplored and the politics of knowledge production may have contributed to this partial view. The 2011 UK Foresight report, for instance, framed climate change as a driver of predominantly short-distance, internal movements, and did not explore cross-border migrations. Similarly, the World Bank’s Groundswell reports (2018; 2021), while they estimate that up to 216 million people could be internally displaced by climate impacts by 2050 across six world regions, remain virtually silent on international migration. The prioritisation of internal mobility in authoritative accounts can be read as signalling a politics of knowledge production that sidelines the international dimension, arguably because states and international organizations are wary of confronting the legal and governance challenges raised by cross-border climate-related migrations, as the latter are deeply entangled with ethical and social justice stakes.

Against this background, the relationship between these internal movements and international migration remains under-researched, and there are few case studies on international migration in the context of climate change. Available quantitative studies highlight the link between environmental factors and both migration and immobility. For example, one study argues that there is a correlation between climate stress factors that affect agricultural production and international migration at the global level (Cai et al., 2016); while another study demonstrates, in contrast, how climate variability affects people’s resources and consequently reduces their ability to migrate in West African countries (Flores et al., 2024). Among qualitative studies, research conducted in Canada with migrants from various African countries suggests a continuum between internal and international migration linked to ecological crises affecting the regions of origin (Veronis & McLeman, 2014). Caroline Zickgraf (2018) also found in a study conducted in Saint Louis & Guet Ndarian on the Senegalese coast that internal and international forms of migration were interlinked in a context of declining fishery resources. Hence, while there is no doubt that internal mobility in the context of the climate crisis is firmly on the rise, the question of international migration’s articulation with the implication of climate changes, while sometimes dismissed, might be better described as under-researched.

Despite the limited empirical research available on international migration in the context of climate change, the alarmist tone of the first publications (for instance Myers, 1993) incentivised lawyers and political scientists to explore the normative dimension of climate migration governance, particularly with regard to relevant categories and instruments (Piguet et al., 2011; Vlassopoulos, 2012). Although the notion of “climate refugee” has currently no legal basis, the concept is fuelling political and legal analyses on the governance of people displaced by climate change across national borders. Some support the use of the category of “climate refugees” (Berchin et al., 2017; Behrman & Kent, 2018) and several researchers have argued in favour of creating legal instruments dedicated to the governance of climate refugees without extending the scope of the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees so as not to weaken it (Schloss, 2018; Biermann & Boas, 2010). Conversely, some international organisations, notably the IOM and the UNHCR, use the terms “environmental migrants” or “climate migrants” and steer clear of the term “refugee.” This position, generally justified by the absence of a climate refugee status in international law, is also widely shared in academic circles for the same reason, as well as the shared acknowledgement of the inevitable entanglement of various factors.

The limited yet growing interest within migration studies also stems from the fact that the question of environmental displacements was taken on board by the UN climate regime. Within the UN regime of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), migration as a phenomenon resulting from climate change was formally included for the first time in 2010 in the Cancun Adaptation Framework under the heading “Enhanced action on adaptation” in article 14(f): “Adoption of measures to promote understanding, coordination and cooperation on displacement, migration and planned resettlement in response to climate change, as appropriate, at the national, regional and international levels” (for a detailed account see Nash, 2018). Following on from this, the 2015 Paris Agreement mandated a group of experts (Task Force on Displacement) under the auspices of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) for Loss and Damage to produce recommendations relating to “averting, minimizing, addressing displacement related to the adverse effects of climate change.” Composed of technical members from international organisations (including the ILO, IOM and UNHCR), international NGOs (such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) and organisations with various statuses, such as the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Hugo Observatory research centre, the group submitted its first report to the WIM Executive Committee in 2018. It is interesting to note that this group of experts is attached to a mechanism that falls under the paradigm of loss and damage, in which migration is considered a non-economic loss, i.e. one that cannot be quantified on a market. At COP 27, a financial fund was created thanks to the political leadership of the Group of 77, a group of countries from the Global South (Lees, 2023) chaired that year by Pakistan, which had just suffered torrential floods in the summer of 2023 that affected more than 33 million people and led to the forced displacement of a large number of them. In 2023, at COP 28, the fund was operationalised within the World Bank. While it is difficult to predict how the fund will be implemented in practice, these institutional structures could, in theory, provide financial assistance to countries most vulnerable to climate change, including in cases of forced displacement, thereby contributing to an embryonic form of climate justice. These considerations aside, the 2018 report of the task force navigated a complex conceptual arena by adhering to the formal paradigm of “avert, minimize, address” that can be seen as reflecting states’ risk reduction and security concerns, while mentioning nevertheless the idea that migration can represent an active adaptation strategy, especially in context of slow-onset effects of climate change (Task Force on Displacement, 2018). Against this background, and while policy interests have driven much of the research on climate-related mobilities (and enabled strong policy-research synergies), carving out spaces for a more critical anchoring of climate migration research, by engaging with the literature on political ecology and intersectionality, might contribute to shape the contours of this rapidly growing field.

4. Bridging Political Ecology and Intersectionality: Addressing Class, Gender and Race in Migration under the Capitalocene

While an account of the different streams of political ecology lies beyond the scope of this article (Gorz, 1992; Næss, 2008; Benjaminsen & Svarstad, 2009; Robbins, 2012), I emphasize here the need to inscribe the environmental factors of contemporary migration in “a world economy that is inseparable from world ecology” (Deléage, 2010). Noting the absence of political ecology approaches in migration studies, Sara Vigil points to possible connections and stresses that “political ecology emphasises the relationship that people have with their environment, paying particular attention to the economic and political forces that characterise the society in which they live and shape that relationship” (Vigil, 2016, p. 72). By considering the relationship between human beings and their living environments beyond scientific ecology (Gorz, 2020), political ecology can provide migration studies with the means to incorporate environmental factors (among others) without “naturalising” or depoliticising them.

From this perspective, the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002), i.e. the identification of the geological impact of human activities that comes to us from the so-called “hard” sciences, can be more accurately described as the Capitalocene (Malm & Hornborg, 2014; Moore, 2016) because the impact of human beings on the Earth’s geology corresponds less to the advent of Homo Sapiens than to the emergence of extractive capitalist structures deployed from the 15th century onwards (Wallerstein, 2011; Moore, 2017). While acknowledging the accelerations engendered by the industrial and technological revolutions of the 19th century, historian and geographer Jason Moore insists on the fact that the roots of the ecological crises are to be located in the long sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that saw the growing appropriation of “cheap nature” for capitalist expansion, enabled by the abstraction of a nature/society dualism (Moore, 2017). Jason Moore calls consequently for the notion of the Anthropocene to be further specified: “[The concept of] the Anthropocene sounds the alarm—and what an alarm it is! But it cannot explain how these alarming changes came about. Questions of capitalism, power and class, anthropocentrism, dualist framings of “nature” and “society,” and the role of states and empires—all are frequently bracketed by the dominant Anthropocene perspective” (Moore, 2016, p. 5).

Taking into account the perspective of the Capitalocene allows moving from a political economy perspective to that of a political ecology attentive to power relations, which inevitably leads to interrogating climate inequalities and therefore to questions of climate justice and responsibilities. In Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s work connections to migration appear explicitly as he draws on stratification and institutional economics as well as a Georgist political economy—that centres the question of land commodification—in order to articulate the latter with the structural production of inequalities and displacement (Obeng-Odoom, 2022). Furthermore, Megan Carney’s research into the climate-food-migration nexus brilliantly fleshes out the gendered implications of neoliberal trade agreements for rural households in the global South, through the example of the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 1994 agreement, by documenting how food insecurity played out in Mexican women’s migration to the United States (Carney, 2017), which related to the fact that households no longer produced for subsistence and which also negatively impacted health (Carney, 2014). Her research convincingly argues that “the expansion and entrenchment of the global-industrial (capitalist) food system has arguably depended on large-scale displacements” (Carney, 2024, p. 2).

Taking into account these perspectives hence uncovers that debates around terminology in the field of climate-related migrations are far from being merely “technical,” rather they are fundamentally political. François Gemenne, a political scientist and pioneer researcher on environmental migration, wrote in 2015: “Upon further thought, however, I am forced to realise that there is something that we had missed out in this process of ‘de-victimisation’ of migrants. We had used environmental change to de-politicise migration and, in our quest to make research policy-relevant, we had let policies take over politics. […] Forgoing the term ‘climate refugee’ is also, in a way, forgoing the idea that climate change is a form of persecution against the most vulnerable and that climate-induced migration is a very political matter, rather than an environmental one” (Gemenne, 2015, p. 71). When François Gemenne points to the implications of rejecting the term “climate refugee” (due to its lack of legal grounding), he is taking this stance in a context in which the concept of “environmental or climate migrant” has already largely become the dominant paradigm in transnational governance circles, rooted in a discourse of “migration as adaptation” to climate change. As stated however, this terminology risks feeding into a depoliticised reading of migration (Bettini & Gioli, 2016), leading some authors to “question how the shift from climate refugees to climate migration could signal a marginalisation of the very problem of ‘climate justice’ in the debate on the climate change and migration nexus, symptomatic of broader tendencies in climate politics” (Bettini, Nash, & Gioli, 2017, p. 349). At the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, leading reports no longer mention climate refugees but climate or environmental migrants, who are resilient to the climate changes affecting their living environments and able to adapt, either individually or as a family unit, “whereas climate refugees were depicted as (potential) helpless victims of climate change-induced forced migration,” hence “the language of climate migration as adaptation radically transforms the location of social agency and, consequently, the responsibility for climate change consequences” (Felli, 2013, p. 350). The case of this discursive transition, from a political and collective understanding underlying the right to international protection, to an individualising and depoliticised conception, demonstrates the need to anchor the academic study of environmental and climate aspects of migration in a political theory that is attentive both to people’s capacity to act and to the structural dimensions of the power relations that produce the conditions for these migrations. The stakes in adopting a political ecology approach hopefully transpire in light of these elements. As argued by Sara Vigil, “socio-ecological systems do not operate in political vacuums” (Vigil, 2024, p. 7), and Gennaro Avallone elaborates further: “The field of political ecology of migration seeks to understand how the reciprocal influence of power relations and socio-ecological dynamics manifests through the lens of human mobility and migration. In concise terms, the political ecology of migration politicizes the discourse on migrations within the context of socio-environmental changes” (Avallone, 2024, p. 6).

Furthermore, and while an understanding of class inequalities is arguably inscribed in the Marxian roots of political ecology, gender and race need to be more explicitly accounted for, and are not exclusive of other forms of social hierarchisation. For this purpose, articulations of gender and race can be located in intersectional and postcolonial approaches to migration. Sara Vigil’s proposition, drawing on feminist political ecology, seeks to engage with gender inequalities: “By revealing the complex interplay between global systems and local realities, a feminist political ecology of migration underscores the need to address both macro-structural factors, like ecological unequal exchange, and localized intersecting social relations in tandem. This approach moves beyond individual experiences of vulnerability to treat gender and social inequities as integral components of the world system in which socio-ecological systems are embedded” (Vigil, 2024, p. 9). Feminist political ecology has indeed engaged for about three decades with “how inequality is (re)produced when women’s environmental engagements, knowledge and activism are neglected” (Sundberg, 2017, p. 4). Gender inequalities are furthermore empirically an essential dimension of mobility and migration experiences and this holds true in the context of climate change. Beyond the dominant pattern of men’s outmigration from rural areas and the increased workload falling on women in such settings (Castillo Betancourt & Zickgraf, 2025), it matters to investigate women’s (im)mobilities yet also the gendered vulnerabilities that affect men owing to expectations anchored in hegemonic masculinity (Cordova Morales et al., 2025) as well to research experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities (Lama et al., 2021). The exacerbation of sexual and gender-based violence also started being increasingly documented, notably in cases of sudden environmental disasters such as cyclones (Rezwana & Pain, 2021), relating to higher risk of staying trapped (Ayeb-Karlsson, 2020) or being exposed to gender-based violence in shelters (Kartiki, 2011). Slow-onset climate stressors also bring about gendered implications, some of which have begun to receive attention in the literature, such as increasing child marriages (Pasten et al., 2024), decreases in marriage-related migrations (Becerra-Valbuena & Millock, 2021), or exposure to human trafficking (Molinari, 2017). Other studies link gender-based violence to the long-term consequences of climate change affecting access to water and food security (Camey et al., 2020). However, the relationship between climate stressors, particularly slow-onset effects, and an increased risk of sexual and gender-based violence remains understudied (Gioli & Milan, 2018), perhaps in part owing to the still relatively marginal, albeit growing, nature of this lens within migration studies overall (Sahraoui, 2024).

As a matter of fact, many of the available case studies around the climate migration nexus stem from disciplines such as environmental economics and quantitative sociology and are based on data collection methods that are ill-suited to capturing gender and power relations as dynamic processes (Jenson & Lépinard, 2009). As several authors point out (Hans et al., 2021), understanding certain vulnerabilities as specific to women risks reifying their experiences and concealing their agency, in the absence of a focus on the social conditions that produce these vulnerabilities. It is therefore necessary to move beyond a reductive definition of gender, limited to a snapshot of gender inequalities for instance, in order to adopt a dynamic understanding that includes both the power relations within which mobility unfolds and the transformations that migration processes themselves can bring about in gender relations. Emphasising the intersectional dimension of migration experiences in the context of climate change thus aims at avoiding repeating the blind spot that characterised migration studies until the 1980s (Morokvasic, 1984). It is only gradually that the diversity of migrant women’s profiles, beyond migration for family reunification, has been studied in European contexts, and that women’s agency has been highlighted (Morokvasic, 2010). Despite the persistence of certain forms of invisibility (Morokvasic, 2011), the field has undergone significant developments since the focus shifted from the experiences of migrant women to gender relations in migration. By now, after four decades of theoretical and empirical developments, several collective works of reference on migration researched through a gendered lens have been published (Oso & Ribas-Mateos, 2013; Mora & Piper, 2021; Ribas-Mateos & Sassen, 2022). This body of research can be mobilised to strengthen gendered approaches to climate-related migrations, taking for instance inspiration from ways to better account for women’s agency in migration (Kofman & Raghuram, 2022) or ways to address questions of masculinity and sexuality in migration (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014; Yurdakul et al., 2025).

The historicization that an approach in terms of political ecology supposes also suggests an engagement with postcolonial approaches to migration, one that makes visible the entanglement of contemporary socio-ecological inequalities with the histories and legacies of colonialism and the reproduction of racialised hierarchies. This is all the more important that this postcolonial dimension is largely absent from the emerging literature on environmental mobility and migration, which contributes to the risk of “naturalisation” and “climate reductionism” mentioned above. Many reports, such as the World Bank’s famous Groundswell report, present vulnerabilities to climate change in an ahistorical manner (Baldwin, 2022). In contrast, Ranabir Samaddar links for instance the effects of British colonisation in India on peasant communities and the displacement caused by famines—from the famine of 1770 to that of 1943, highlighting the impact of the great famine of 1876 to 1878, which caused the deaths of 6 to 10 million people, and emphasises the postcolonial continuities resulting from the weight of the political and economic structures inherited from colonisation in the production of contemporary displacements (Samaddar, 2020). The renown Indian political scientist hence links class, racialised postcolonial status and the political economy of environmental displacement when he writes: “We can make a greater sense of this incessant production of migrant labour that capitalism can neither digest nor do away with, by placing the interrelations between ecology, migration, and political economy at the heart of our understanding of early twenty-first-century capitalism” (Samaddar, 2017, p. 187). One way to take seriously these legacies is to engage with race inequalities as a contemporary avatar of these inherited differentiations illuminated by a political economy of colonialism (Bhambra & Holmwood, 2023). This task is however not self-evident as European migration studies have been comparatively more reluctant to engage with colonialism and race than with gender, and this endeavour remains to be further developed (Erel et al., 2016; Tudor, 2018; Mayblin & Turner, 2020; Lemberg-Pedersen et al., 2022). Similarly, Sharlene Mollett and Caroline Faria have also come to the realization that feminist political ecology suffered from limited analytical engagement with race-related inequalities, reflecting the broader workings of whiteness within academic knowledge production, which led them to advocate for the deployment of a postcolonial intersectionality in that field (Mollett & Faria, 2013).

In relation to the theme of climate migration this is particularly important as there exists a specific racialisation of the political relation between migration and climate change. As argued by Andrew Baldwin: “the discourse on climate change and migration is, in this sense, a form of power that reproduces a racialised social hierarchy between white humanism and what we might call the racial other of climate change, the figure purportedly displaced by climate” (Baldwin, 2022, xv). Though the issue of racialisation generated and reproduced by top-down migration categorisations concerns the field of migration studies as a whole (Erel et al., 2016), Baldwin (2022) suggests that a particular form of racialisation underlies the figure of the environmental/climate migrant. Studies on media coverage of “climate refugees” clearly show indeed that such representations are systematically based on photographs of racialised people (Methmann, 2014), a depiction generally linked to the idea of migration from the Global South to the Global North. Although scientifically inaccurate, this representation is nonetheless performative, can easily serve to justify the paradigm of migration’s securitization (Boas, 2015) and is particularly easy to exploit politically in the context of the rise and access to power of far-right political formations in many European countries as well as in the United States. Addressing heads on the postcolonial underpinnings of dominant representations of “climate migrants” is hence necessary to reveal the processes of racialisation that also play a role in the depoliticization of the issue through processes of othering that facilitate the use and circulation of the abstract figure of the environmental or climate migrant.

5. Ultimately, A Matter of Relating Climate Justice and Migrant Justice

This article started from the premise that a political ecology approach to migration can help seeing beyond the epistemological shortcomings of a Westphalian rendering of the world to reveal global patterns of socio-ecological inequalities in the Capitalocene, while foregrounding that this theoretical endeavour also needs an intersectional commitment to researching lived experiences of migration at the same time. At the crossroads of these varied strands of literature—brought together for the purpose of sketching out a theoretical grounding that allows for the exploration of environmental and climate aspects in migration without depoliticising these questions—migrant and climate justice struggles appear to converge in reminding us the role concerned people should have in shaping their own narratives and the policies that affect them. Politics of knowledge production are in this regard decisive and rather than reinforcing the abstract figure of the climate migrant, aligned on a discursive performance, research into these topics can serve to unravel the complexities, nuances and longer histories of inequalities that contemporary lived experiences of migrating in a world affected by the varied implications of climate changes entail.

To take one example, in early debates on climate migration governance, the voices of those affected were indeed rarely heard. The inhabitants of Tuvalu for instance, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, were quickly labelled climate refugees par excellence in media and institutional discourses, in a context in which rising sea levels threaten to submerge all the islands that make up the country’s sovereign territory. However, several studies show that Tuvaluans view migration as a normal activity, whereas the paradigm of climate refugees as victims to be saved, as portrayed in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, does not allow the perspectives of Tuvaluans to be heard (Farbotko & Lazrus, 2012). In this respect, the case of Tuvalu reminds us that while international protection can serve to uphold human rights, its meaning and the conditions for its implementation cannot be decided without the people whose protection is at stake. Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini warn against governance practices that are guided more by fears (stemming from alarmist rhetoric) than by the interests of the concerned populations: “If an epistemic community is able to configure climate change as a problem of runaway migration, which by implication may threaten elite authority, then labelling huge portions of the world’s population, notably the poor, as potential climate migrants or refugees offers elites a means to exercise their authority over those so labelled” (Baldwin & Bettini, 2017, p. 8). According to these authors, putting climate migration on the agenda is therefore a double-edged sword, as also pointed at in the opening quote by Mohamed Nasheed, and the question of what place is given to the perspectives of migrant persons themselves in the construction of this governance echoes the concerns of advocates for migrant justice (Saad, 2017).

The case of Tuvalu also shows that labour migration programmes (such as those offered by Australia) are not up to the challenges of climate justice and reproduce the injustices inherent in guest worker programmes (as in the example mentioned in the first section around the German Gastarbeiter programme post World War II), in which the economic needs and priorities of the most economically powerful states determine the rights of migrants (Farbotko et al., 2022). These concerns also resonate with what Andrew Curley and Sara Smith perceive as the Eurocentric “cene scene” drawing our attention to the fact that a notion such as the Capitalocene (along with other “cenes”) should not conceal non-Western understandings of time and space in indigenous knowledges (Curley & Smith, 2024). Their aim is not to undermine the responsibility engendered by histories of colonisation and capitalism but to open up “to different kinds of politics and solutions” (Ibid., p. 179).

Achieving different kinds of politics might be pursued by centring both participatory methodologies in migration research and intersectionality’s commitment to social justice. Considering the environmental factors of migration, at the intersection of climate justice and migration justice, through an intersectional political ecology lens, aims at making space for the perspectives of migrant persons themselves, who, depending on the context, may express different voices and articulate diverse choices, transcending the ideal types of both the climate refugee and the environmental migrant.

Acknowledgements

This research has been conducted in the framework of the GENDEREDCLIMATEMIG project, funded by the European Research Council under grant agreement nº 101076072. I would like to warmly thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and stimulating feedback reflected in this revised version of the article.

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