Subject Based Discussion by Sarah Louise Nash

Negotiating mobilities in the context of climate change: human mobility and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

Increasingly, human mobility is being recognised as one of the key societal consequences of climate change, both in the domains of climate change politics and human mobility politics. For example, the September 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants includes climate change as a potential driver of mobility in its preamble. Human mobility has also been a topic of discussions at global climate change negotiations within the UNFCCC since 2008. This has included three agreed-upon mentions of human mobility in outcome documents of climate change negotiations, culminating in the creation of a Task Force on displacement at the Paris negotiations in December 2015.

This seminar charts the history of human mobility within the UNFCCC and situates human mobility in different areas of climate change politics, namely mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. Furthermore, this seminar will be able to offer personal insights from the most recent round of climate change negotiations that have taken place in November 2016 in Marrakech. Lastly, the seminar looks beyond Marrakech to discuss how human mobility may continue to be represented on the policy agenda of the UNFCCC.