Climate and migration in the Pacific: a cultural geography

perspective

Carol Farbotko

Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research

University of Wollongong, Australia

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this paper are the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), or its Board of Governors, or the governments they represent. ADB does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this paper and accepts no responsibility for any consequence of their use. The countries listed in this paper do not imply any view on ADB's part as to sovereignty or independent status or necessarily conform to ADB's terminology.

Research interests• Conceptualizing and testing the ways in which climate change shapes meanings

of mobility and place.

• Analysing the social structures that give places and mobility meaning in a

warming world.

Focus: Australia and the Pacific islands, particularly Tuvalu.

Key question: How do inhabitants and outsiders

conceptualise and contest the meanings of sea level rise

through ideas such as ‘present’ and ‘future’, ‘citizen’ and

‘climate refugee’, ‘home’ and ‘migration’.

British journalists filming high tides , Funafuti, Tuvalu, Feb 2006

A cultural geography perspective

Advances understanding of how:

• Climate change is spatialized into treasured territories

such as sovereign ground and ‘disappearing islands’;

• Climate migration is enfolded through discourses of

security;

• Understandings of self, home and future can be

nurtured for present and future resilience to climate

change.

Research projects

1) Imaginative geographies of

Tuvalu and climate change

1) Pacific mobility discourses

Nanumaga island, Tuvalu, 2005

Imaginative geographies of Tuvalu and climate change

• Exploring the effects of Tuvalu islands and Tuvaluan bodies as sites to

concretize climate science’s statistical abstractions: how do sea-level rise

debates reverberate around Western mythologies of island laboratories?

(Farbotko 2010b);

• Exploring new forms of disaster capitalism: how is capital responsive not

only to the traditionally understood immediacy of disasters, but to the

slow, incremental aspects of the ‘climate crisis’? (Farbotko 2010a).

• Exploring the political possibilities of affect: what happened when a

member of the Tuvaluan delegation wept in the purportedly rational

spaces of the climate change negotiations at Copenhagen? (Farbotko and

McGregor 2010);

Pacific mobility discourses

Tuvaluans have experienced the notion of climate refugees as a discursive

force with significant experiential and emotional effects: superficial and

often paternalistic journalistic accounts of Tuvaluans and their islands has led

to frustration with an imposed discourse of vulnerability; the label ‘climate

refugee’ is widely rejected among Tuvaluans (Farbotko and Lazrus in press).

Tuvaluan children, first King Tide festival, Tuvalu 2010 (photograph: Eliala Fihaki)

Pacific mobility discourses

Tuning in to ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ of Pacific islanders - identifying

alternative Pacific discourses of mobility (Farbotko in press):

1. islanders as skilled oceanic navigators ; and

2. survivors when cast adrift.

Vaka

Next steps...

High tides in Funafuti, Tuvalu, Jan 2006

Aim: To analyse the influence of messages about climate change on the ways in which Pacific children understand themselves, their homes and their futures.

Project 1: Disappearing futures? Pacific children, climate change and changing senses of belonging

Project 2: Where can we go? Linking Tuvaluan ancestries with migration opportunities

Travellers boarding Nivaga II, Funafuti, Tuvalu, 2005

Collaborators: Taukiei Kitara, Tuvalu Climate Action Network and Heather Lazrus, National Centre for Atmospheric Research, USA.

Aims: 1) To design and implement an innovative climate change adaptation tool: a

comprehensive database linking Tuvaluan genealogies and migration opportunities.2) To assess the role of genealogies in advancing community-based climate change

migration-adaptation strategies in Tuvalu.

ReferencesFarbotko, C. and Lazrus, H. (in press) ‘Whose voice: questioning climate refugee

narratives’, Global Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions.

Farbotko, C. (in press) ‘Skilful seafarers, oceanic drifters or climate refugees? Pacific

people, news value and the climate refugee crisis’ in Migration and the Media,

Threadgold, T., Gross, B. and Moore, K. (eds.) Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing.

Farbotko, C. (2010) ‘”The global warming clock is ticking so see these places while you

can”: voyeuristic tourism and model environmental citizens on Tuvalu’s disappearing

islands’ Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31(2):224-238.

Farbotko, C. (2010) ‘Wishful sinking: Disappearing islands, climate refugees and

cosmopolitan experimentation’ Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51(1):47-60.

Farbotko, C. and McGregor, H.V. (2010) ‘Copenhagen, climate science and the

emotional geographies of climate change’ Australian Geographer 41(2):159-166.