Internal and international climate-induced migration, gendered inequalities and governance: understanding migration decisions, exploring migration experiences

Project Information

GENDEREDCLIMATEMIG

Grant agreement ID: 101076072

DOI

10.3030/101076072

EC signature date 26 January 2023

Start date 1 July 2023

End date 30 June 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 495 733,00

EU contribution

€ 1 495 733,00

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GENDEREDCLIMATEMIG (Internal and international climate-induced migration, gendered inequalities and governance: understanding migration decisions, exploring migration experiences)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The EU-funded GENDEREDCLIMATEMIG project explores climate-related migration from a gendered perspective, mobilising an interdisciplinary, comparative and participatory methodology. It seeks to shed light on a phenomenon that remains invisible within administrative and statistical categories available to date. As climate-related causes are often difficult to isolate, research needs to explore the relative weight of climate-related events in migratory trajectories and experiences. With case studies conducted in three middle-income countries and regional migration hubs - Malaysia, Mexico and Morocco - this project explores the decision-making processes and experiences of those on the move in the context of climate change. The project also entails a gender-sensitive inquiry into the current state of climate migration governance at international and national levels.

While the concept of climate change allows us to name a global reality, its effects are localised. They are sometimes slow, when droughts become more frequent and longer and have a lasting impact on agricultural and pastoral practices. They can also be sudden, when floods and cyclones hit communities with an intensity exacerbated by climate change, sometimes repeatedly. Within the GENDEREDCLIMATEMIG project, we seek to understand how these challenges interact with mobility and migration by working with the stories and voices of those affected by the implications of a changing climate. We are interested in the perceptions of migrant persons regarding the ways in which these environmental factors affect their livelihoods and shape their mobility patterns. We work with people who move internally as well as those who have crossed borders, and examine the links between these different forms of mobility. We also take into account that men and women are not affected in the same way by these environmental challenges and that experiences of mobility in this context are both shaped by and can in turn shape gender relations.

GENDEREDCLIMATEMIG seeks to advance our understanding of the under-researched climate-migration-gender nexus while carving out space for migrants’ voices and concerned communities through participatory methods and artistic collaborations.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first two years of the project, we assembled a dynamic interdisciplinary team of postdoctoral migration scholars spanning anthropology, geography, sociology, and political science. Together, we explore mobilities and migration in the context of climate change from a gendered perspective. Our work is grounded in a shared commitment to bridging academic disciplines and local and global perspectives.

In late 2024, we held a series of workshops (in collaboration with the GRABS project) to develop shared tools and approaches for collaborative research, in addition to our regular meetings focused on literature reviews and fieldwork preparation. These workshops explored key themes such as gendered and intersectional approaches in migration research, participatory and creative methodologies, research ethics in fieldwork with migrant persons, and researchers’ well-being during fieldwork. We benefited from the insights of leading migration scholars invited as key note speakers to our workshops. These events helped strengthen our theoretical and methodological foundations while offering space for reflection ahead of our fieldwork phase.

One of our achievements has thus been to work through these milestones towards a shared analytical framework that builds bridges across the disciplines we mobilise collectively. We engage for instance with cross-disciplinary approaches such as political ecology and specific concepts such as migrant subjectivities from anthropology, the notion of habitability as foregrounded by geographers, and the critical insights of gender studies as a transdisciplinary field. We combine this integrative approach with participatory methods to enable us to better understand how localised implications of climate change are experienced and responded to, especially in relation to mobility and gender relations in the context of broader structural inequalities. We hence understand slow-onset climate impacts not as isolated drivers of migration, but as continuous forces shaping mobility before, during, and after people move —mediated by social perceptions and embedded in structural conditions. The interdisciplinary and participatory dimensions of our research pave the ground for regional workshops to be organised in Year 3 of the project with our partners in in Morocco, Mexico, and Malaysia.

Visit our multilingual project website to learn more, access updates, and subscribe to our newsletter: https://genderedclimatemig.cnrs.fr

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

As our fieldwork progresses, the use of participatory methods is already yielding rich and unexpected insights. By centring participants’ own perspectives and lived experiences, new questions and themes have emerged—many of which were not anticipated in our original interview guides. For example, in Mexico, participants highlighted how climate-related vulnerabilities are shaping the lives of migrant populations within urban settings, drawing attention to overlooked challenges affecting migrant persons in particular in metropolitan areas. In rural Morocco, in-depth engagement —including women-only focus groups and informal time spent with women of different ages— has opened up valuable perspectives on gendered experiences of recurrent climate stressors in the context of diminishing non-economic resources. These participatory approaches help us build relationships of trust in order to better understand community needs and the complex meanings of mobility. Long-term engagement in the field hence fosters opportunities for meaningful exchange and knowledge-sharing with the communities involved. Our comparative and interdisciplinary approach promises to strengthen the theoretical reach of our work and to enhance its social relevance through sustained and participatory engagement with communities. To support international collaborations, we are planning multilingual regional workshops with academic and civil society partners, designed to foster co-authored and joint publications and help bridge language barriers in global debates around the climate-migration nexus, in particular from a gendered perspective.

Results from droughts and flash floods, Sirwa valley, Morocco, photograph by Nina Sahraoui, May 2025