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Talking about migration and human environment relations in times of globalization and climate change is a highly relevant but also difficult venture. The debate usually takes place in a blurred field between science, media and politics. The tug of war between alarmists and sceptics has dominated the scientific debate. Whereas the alarmists try to show a causal link between climate change and migration, the sceptics deny direct causal relation between environment and migration and criticize the “shaky empirical character and sloppy nature” (Piguet 2012: 155) of the alarmist assumptions. Since the advent of a critical view of climate change and migration, it seems that scholars increasingly refrain from drawing links between environmental change – including climate change – and human migration in order to avoid the geo-determinism trap. However, we start from the assumption that human-environment relations are intimately coupled and argue that the heated debate should not prevent us from scrutinizing the complex nature of these interrelations. Doing so we further argue that this can be realized by combining on a conceptual level the discussion of two broad topics that even today remain largely unconnected: translocality and SocialEcological Systems (SES) approaches.  

TransRe Working Paper No. 2

Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Bonn.

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.4402.9765