I collaborated with Dr. Elizabeth Lunstrum (Geography) and Dr. Anna Zalik (Environmental Studies) at York University as leaders of the Environmental Displacement Cluster of the Canadian Refugee Resettlement Network. We hosted a conference at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University in May 2012 that addressed the issue of environmentally induced displacement (EID) that focused on issues of climate change, resource extraction, and conservation in particular. Two publications in particular have come out of this workshop: a special issue of the journal Refuge (January 2014) dedicated to the topic of environmentally-induced forced migration and an issue of the journal Area (May 2015) dedicated to exploring the idea of EID. Please click below to download the introductions to these special issues:
Area_Intro
As part of my broader work on displacement and environment I am particularly fascinated by the ways that climate change — not only in terms of the transformations it will bring to our landscapes but the attempts to ameliorate such effects — will impact marginalized groups. Among the specific examples I am interested in is the case of Bangladesh is often discussed in both scholarly literature and popular discourse as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to the possible effects of climate change. Images of rising waters, flooded fields, and displaced farmers in the region have become an iconic symbol used in debates both locally and elsewhere. The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in domestic and international initiatives designed to ameliorate the impacts of climate change. In many ways, “climate change adaptation” has become as much of a part of the development mantra today as microcredit, participation, and shrimp aquaculture have been in earlier eras. I argue that climate change mitigation and adaptation have emerged as a new set of development orthodoxies in the following article published in Area: