Climate- and weather-related displacement of people is a growing concern worldwide. Between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, and millions are displaced each year due to sudden disasters such as flooding and fire, slow-onset land degradation, and social unrest caused by resources scarcity.
The challenges for cities are immense – the involuntary migration caused by climate and weather brings with it overloaded infrastructure, inadequate access to affordable housing, social tensions, increased poverty, and inequality. Cities have to contend with:
a) locally-displaced residents whose neighborhood is being affected by climate impacts and/or by maladaptation from climate resilience projects who are moving to a new neighborhood, district, or city within the broader metropolitan area;
(b) international or national migrants pushed out of their homes by the often combined effects of climate disasters, land and livelihoods loss, and safety concerns, and who are relocating to those same municipalities; and
(c) residents who resist impacts and upgrade against impacts in place and struggle to keep their homes and neighborhoods stable despite impacts.”
About CIDRARC
CIDRARC is the Global Research Network on Climate-Induced Displacement, Resettlement, Adaptation, and Resilience for Cities, a research partnership, hosted by the School of Cities, that connects a team of international social and physical scientists and practitioners to refine our understanding of human decisions about adaptation and migration, as well as the adaptive capacities of different groups and infrastructures across contexts. The goal of CIDRARC is to build greater understanding of how climate displacement plays out in different contexts based on the interplay of individual and institutional perceptions and management of risk. Our objectives are thus:
- to identify how local embodied knowledge in urban regions informs climate adaptation through the lens of displacement in different contexts;
- to develop new measures of climate migration;
- to build communities of practice and tools to help different types of cities, from core to periphery, cope with climate displacement and its related inequities and vulnerabilities.
CIDRARC emerged in 2023 out of two workshops funded by a SSHRC Connections Grant and led by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Boston University’s Initiative on Cities (read the summary report). In Spring 2024, SSHRC awarded CIDRARC a Partnership Development Grant, which supported research including eight case studies (Barcelona, Boston, Capetown, Costa Rica, Karachi, Kelowna, Melbourne, Toronto).
The leadership team includes:
- School of Cities, University of Toronto (host)
- Initiative on Cities, Boston University
- Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, Autonomous University of Barcelona
- Karachi Urban Lab, Institute of Business Administration
- Centre for Cities, University of Melbourne
Other affiliates include the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy; the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy; Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics, Georgia Tech; Leverhulme Centre for Wildfire, Environment & Society, King’s College London; Mobility Justice Lab, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Centre for Refugee Studies, York University; Alberta Land Institute, University of Alberta; Center on Forced Displacement, Boston University; and Earth Refuge.
The research
CIDRARC’s research objective is to understand how the management of climate, risk, and displacement – by both individuals/households and governments/institutions – affects the habitability of specific places and results in in- or out-migration in different contexts.
Current research questions include:
- What types of displacements are there at play and how are households and governments managing them? How do cities contend with multiple forms of climate mobilities and immobilities affecting their residents and infrastructure while responding to concurrent housing and health crises, as well as issues of livelihoods and rights?
- To what extent does the management of climate
,risk,and displacement compromise or improve habitability? - What areas around the globe are best or worst for migration and habitability?
- How are trade-offs managed by residents and jurisdictions? What are the outcomes for habitability and just adaptation?
These questions will be addressed initially through close collaborations with 12 cities in five countries (Canada, United States, Australia, Spain, and Pakistan).