Rebuild or Retreat? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Migration and Mobility in the Global North

Call for Papers

T.C. Boyle’s eco-thriller Blue Skies published in 2023 paints a hauntingly familiar picture of a climate-ravaged future — one that feels eerily close to reality. The novel’s characters live in a constant state of tension, caught between encroaching wildfires in California and rising waters in Florida. As disaster closes in, they face an unavoidable truth: there’s nowhere left to go but away. Forced to abandon their homes, they join the growing tide of climate migrants, turning fiction into a reflection of our own uncertain future.

The World Bank’s 2021 Groundswell report highlights climate change as an increasingly powerful driver of migration (Clement et al.). It projects that by 2050, it could force 216 million people across six world regions to relocate within their own countries. While a significant number of people will be displaced in the Global South, it is also a matter that concerns the Global North. Nations and communities in the Global North are increasingly experiencing the impacts of — mostly internal — climate migration, i.e. the movement of people within a country's borders primarily due to sea-level rise. Unlike acute climate events such as hurricanes or wildfires, sea-level rise is a slow-moving, long-term process that gradually impacts coastal communities over decades. While it is chronic in nature, its effects — such as coastal erosion, frequent flooding, and saltwater intrusion — can lead to acute disasters when combined with extreme weather events like storm surges and hurricanes. Together, historically, gradual destruction and the one stemming from disaster scenarios have endangered the existence of many communities along the coastlines with no exception to the United States, as seen in the case of internal migration following Hurricane Katrina. Sweet et al. (2022) find that sea levels on the coasts of the 48 states spanning the conterminous U.S. are rising more rapidly than the global average. In consequence, over 20 million Americans could be forced to relocate in the coming decades, with more than 13 million facing permanent displacement due to sea-level rise by 2100, as highlighted in Matthew E. Hauer’s Nature article (2017). 

Thus, internal climate migration due to sea-level rise, is no longer a future scenario as imagined in climate fiction or scientific reports, but an already lived reality by low-lying coastal communities across the United States. For instance, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, has already lost over 98% of its land to rising waters and erosion forcing the community to abandon the place their ancestors had lived on for centuries (Jimenez-Damary et al. 2020). While rising sea levels are impacting all coastal regions from Virginia to Washington state, minority communities are often — and, historically speaking, were always — disproportionately affected. The erosion of roads, sewage systems, and buildings and other impacts are leading to costly repairs and economic decline and pose serious risks to human health. In Louisiana, for example, sea-level rise and higher temperatures are a serious threat to wetland fisheries, forcing many people to abandon their homes and livelihoods. 

This scenario has prompted urgent debates on whether to rebuild or retreat and relocate. In their policy report Beyond Rebuilding: Planning for Better Managed Retreat published by the the DC-based think tank “New America,” Robustelli et al. advocate for the urgency of “an ambitious plan to support millions of Americans to steadily relocate in a way that is financially feasible, community-led, and socioeconomically equitable” (2023). In their analyses, politicians and policy advisers do not necessarily speak of (internal climate) migration. Instead, they have adopted the terminology of “managed retreat” to refer to the abandonment of occupied land and the removal or relocation of population and/or infrastructure out of areas subject to repeated flooding, rising sea level, or other natural hazards (Siders et al. 2019). Even though managed retreat is “a new concept in scientific and policy discussions, flooding [, which has forced people living near coasts or rivers to relocate,] has been threatening U.S. communities throughout the history of the nation,” as geologist Nicholas Pinter reminds us (2021). Other countries in the Global North, particularly Western European nations led by the Netherlands, have begun to implement publicly funded programs managing strategic retreat, which include buy backs of homes in affected coastal areas and targeted relocation (Lepesant 2024). In the United States, however, culture wars and climate change denialism of the conservative right and its MAGA movement have complicated the matter as seen with the recent freezing of respective Federal funds or as in the case of Florida — one of the hardest hit states of coastal sea level rise — through implementing a “Don’t say Climate Change” bill and its governor refusing to publicly address the matter of managed retreat (Tampa Bay Times, February 17, 2025). 

Climate change and its effects — including discussions about migration and adaptation  — have, thus, many layers which have been studied from an interdisciplinary perspective. Understanding its complex causes, impacts, and solutions requires integrating insights from environmental science, urban planning, policy studies, sociology, history, and beyond. This conference brings together scholars from diverse disciplines to examine contemporary and historical cases of sea level rise and the need for managed retreat in the United States — and as a matter of comparison within the Global North — Western Europe. By bridging knowledge across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, we aim to explore how societies navigate climate-induced displacement and adaptation.

Submission Guidelines

For this two-day conference, we invite colleagues to submit proposals by June 16, 2025, for individual presentations (20 minutes) that provide interdisciplinary perspectives on climate migration and mobility in the Global North by addressing the following questions:

• Which communities have access to funds that help managed retreat? How do these communities collaborate with local and federal governments or private interest groups?

• What case studies reveal the successes and failures of retreat strategies? Why do many residents prefer to rebuild rather than relocate? Which coastal communities have relocated or are planning to move?

• What role do policy frameworks, insurance mechanisms, and legal structures play in shaping responses to displacement? Using what criteria and by whom is the need determination made for community-level managed retreat?

• What lessons  — from both the Global North and the Global South  — can be drawn from past and present planned relocation efforts? What forms of climate-induced displacement and adaptation have societies and governments applied in the past?

• How do cultural, religious, and artistic expressions capture and influence public perceptions of climate migration and managed retreat?

• Lastly, on a methodological level: How do different disciplines conceptualize climate migration and human mobility, and where do their approaches intersect or diverge?

By engaging with these questions, this conference fosters a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue on one of the most pressing challenges of our time: the growing necessity — and resistance — to climate-driven migration in the Global North.

Submission and Contact Information

Although we favor in-person attendance of participants / presenters, facilities for hybrid participation will be provided with the aim of making the event as inclusive as possible. Please submit a short CV and paper abstract of no more than 500 words online in our application portal by June 16, 2025. Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel is available upon request (for one presenter per paper) for selected  scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources. For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Jana Dunz-Keck or Sarah Beringer. For questions about the submission platform or logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter.