This chapter offers an overview of the history of human migration, conditions pertaining to past migrations, and the types of evidence that allow their study. The importance of scales of time and space is illustrated by ‘standing still’ for a thousand years at a busy crossroads in Europe, and observing the emergence of new social forms. How can these observations help to anticipate and formulate responses to contemporary population movements?

Christian actors and institutions in the Pacific have taken to integrating themes of climate change, sea-level rise, and migration into their religious discourses and practices. Here what interests me is the deliberate reception, processing, and incorporation of the climate change cum migration problematic into the Christian governing practice. Foucault's conception of governmentality – how political power is exercised in the modern era – supplies the analytical instrumentarium for exploring this practice. A series of official declarations by Pacific churches, as well as three case studies from different regions of Oceania (Fiji, Kiribati, and Papua New Guinea), offer a window into the relationship between Christianity, forced migration, and climate change. I examine how Christian churches and actors now position themselves in the conflicted terrain of climate change and displacement as moral authorities and indispensable mediators on the local, national, and international levels.

This chapter offers an overview of the history of human migration, conditions pertaining to past migrations, and the types of evidence that allow their study. The importance of scales of time and space is illustrated by ‘standing still’ for a thousand years at a busy crossroads in Europe, and observing the emergence of new social forms. How can these observations help to anticipate and formulate responses to contemporary population movements?

This chapter addresses traditional Inuit societies and their responses to climatic changes. It is argued that, due to the Arctic region's island-like status concerning environment, climate, geography, and cultural history, and due to an interdisciplinary Arctic research tradition, this region is particularly favourable to study and learn from, with regard to societies and climate change. Moreover, it is argued that societal response to climate fluctuations is best understood in an intergenerational time perspective and at large geographical scales, as can be provided in the deep archaeological time-scale within the Arctic world. From recent fieldwork in north-east Greenland, this area's prehistory is discussed in relation to climate change. This case is followed by a discussion of four aspects of Inuit prehistory of the eastern Arctic that are considered crucial to the Inuit adaptation and success during the centuries, i.e. (1) the initial Thule culture migration into the eastern Arctic; (2) breathing-hole sealing technology; (3) snow house technology; and (4) Inuit long-distance travels in the eighteenth century. In the chapter it is concluded that the Inuit did not invent new strategies or technologies in relation to stress induced e.g. by climate change. Instead they relied on an inherent flexibility in their living and being in the Arctic, involving high mobility and frequent migrations at the individual level, which enabled them to overcome crises caused by social conflicts as well as environmentally dependent changes. Further, it is concluded that the Inuit had an ability to creatively integrate technologies and life-ways resulting from their cultural encounters, e.g. with people from the Late Dorset culture, European whalers, and Moravians, that were successfully employed when climatic-induced environmental changes affected their life and societies.

Projections of sea-level rise generally imply that Pacific low-lying reef and atoll islands will be subject to considerable environmental changes, gradually diminishing their habitability. As a result, the option of abandoning the islands either through increased migration and/or relocation has been proposed as a potential adaptation strategy. Drawing on insights from Solomon Islands, this chapter explores how outlying island communities both historically and recently have engaged in human mobilities and partial relocations beyond the islands and in what ways these practices form active and deliberate adaptation strategies. Based on findings, it is argued that moving people into new locations as a response to climate change could have large socio-cultural, economic, and environmental consequences, potentially creating new vulnerabilities for the communities involved. Thus, any required future relocation of communities must be planned carefully, in order to select appropriate destinations for resettlement, and to guarantee long-term ownership or user rights to land and other resources in order to secure people's livelihood opportunities.

Projections of sea-level rise generally imply that Pacific low-lying reef and atoll islands will be subject to considerable environmental changes, gradually diminishing their habitability. As a result, the option of abandoning the islands either through increased migration and/or relocation has been proposed as a potential adaptation strategy. Drawing on insights from Solomon Islands, this chapter explores how outlying island communities both historically and recently have engaged in human mobilities and partial relocations beyond the islands and in what ways these practices form active and deliberate adaptation strategies. Based on findings, it is argued that moving people into new locations as a response to climate change could have large socio-cultural, economic, and environmental consequences, potentially creating new vulnerabilities for the communities involved. Thus, any required future relocation of communities must be planned carefully, in order to select appropriate destinations for resettlement, and to guarantee long-term ownership or user rights to land and other resources in order to secure people's livelihood opportunities.

This chapter explains the likely consequences of proposals to resettle large numbers of people away from the Pacific Islands for the people left behind. It does this by describing the effects of large-scale migration away from the small island state of Niue, which is a very good analogue from which lessons for other islands can be drawn.

The chapter begins by examining the discourse on large-scale migration as a solution to save the people of the Pacific Islands from the impacts of climate change. The discourse of draining the people from these remote island backwaters of the world persists even though understanding of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in the Pacific Islands remains extremely limited. In this discourse there is little concern for the needs and rights of migrants, and no consideration of the consequences of such movements for those people who cannot or do not wish to move. It is this latter issue that this chapter examines.

There has been large-scale migration from Niue since 1971, to the extent that 80 per cent of the people born in Niue now live in New Zealand. There are six principal effects of this depopulation on those who remain on the island, namely that it leads to: distortions in markets; obsolescent political and administrative institutions; a hyper-concentration of social capital; increased demands on labour; difficulties in defining and maintaining that which is ‘traditional’; and an erosion of Niuean identity.

Based on this examination, the chapter argues that migration is likely to be an impact of climate change as much as it is to be an adaptation. Mitigation and adaptation must therefore be the preferred strategies, although there may be scope for carefully managed labour migration as part of a suite of adaptation strategies.

This chapter presents an empirical study examining the relationship between environmental stress and rural–urban migration in northern Ethiopia. It begins with an exploration of the evolution of the debate on ‘environmental refugees’, arguing that, more than anything else, this debate has constituted a battle for discursive legitimacy. From this perspective the chapter uses case studies from northern Ethiopia to show that mobility forms an important social response to environmental stress, but notes that it does so because of the socio-political and economic context in which such stress occurs, rather than in spite of it. To this end case studies from northern Ethiopia will be used to challenge the conception of migration as a failure to adapt and/or as a strategy inevitably pursued at the end point of vulnerability. In so doing the chapter will argue that migration represents a strategic livelihood option, only enacted when the contexts (social, economic, and political) structuring other livelihood options mean that it makes sense to do so. Here the chapter will argue for the politicization and historical location of mobility decisions taken in a context of environmental stress. Specifically the chapter argues that it is micro-scale, socio-political, and economic contexts which determine whether migration is enacted in response to the imperatives generated by macro-scale processes of environmental stress. The chapter closes with a reflection on the implications of these findings for policy.