Project description
Understanding habitability in the context of climate change
Emerging scientific debates often define habitability as a fixed concept based on physical conditions. This overlooks its cultural and social aspects, creating a gap in understanding how people experience and shape habitability. The ERC-funded ALTHAEA project will advance the understanding of habitability in the context of climate change by examining how meaning-making, cultural values, social practices, and politics shape perceptions of what is habitable. By combining insights from human geography, environmental psychology, political science, and climate adaptation science, the project will create a theoretical framework of ‘lived habitability’. Focusing on preventive planned relocation, a lesser-known aspect of climate-related mobility, it will explore how different stakeholders define and negotiate habitability, particularly in Europe.
Objective
ALTHAEA will pioneer a novel approach to habitability in the context of climate change by investigating how meaning-making processes, cultural values, social practices, and politics shape what is considered habitable. Emerging scientific debates present habitability as a self-explanatory concept and frame it in deterministic and materialistic terms (i.e. as fixed and objective conditions resulting from crossing a physical threshold and/or exhausting resources sustaining life and livelihoods). Yet, these understandings neglect that habitability is culturally and socially experienced and intersectionally differentiated and overlook the role of human agency in shaping the habitability of places. As a result, there is a critical gap in understanding what habitability means and how it is practiced by people on the ground. My project will combine approaches and ideas from human geography, environmental psychology, political science and climate adaptation science to develop a new theoretical framework of “lived habitability” in a changing climate through comparative case study research and by empirically focusing on the link between (framed) eroding habitability and human (im)mobility. I will investigate an understudied form of climate-related human mobility – preventive planned relocation – to elucidate the meaning and practices around habitability that different stakeholders enact, and I will originally focus on its emerging employment in Europe. My project will offer an extended and comprehensive approach to habitability by studying how it is socially constructed, negotiated and contested by different stakeholders, across places, scales and time. It will also allow for responding to the key question of what makes a place habitable and for whom and to explore how habitability in the context of climate change is governed now and into the future.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences economics and business business and management employment
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology climatic changes
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
2361 Laxenburg
Austria
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.