The planned relocation of communities away from areas of climate-related risk has emerged as a critical strategy to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Empirical examples from around the world show, however, that such relocations often lead to poor outcomes for affected communities. To address this challenge, and contribute to developing guidelines for just and sustainable relocation processes, this paper calls attention to three fundamental tensions in planned relocation processes: (1) conceptualizations of risk and habitability; (2) community consultation and ownership; and (3) siloed policy frameworks and funding mechanisms. Drawing on the collective experience of 29 researchers, policymakers and practitioners from around the world working on planned relocations in the context of a changing climate, we provide strategies for collectively and collaboratively acknowledging and navigating these tensions among actors at all levels, to foster more equitable and sustainable relocation processes and outcomes.

Climate-related planned relocations are happening globally yet vary significantly. Drawing on diverse case studies, we present a framework to showcase these differences and identify advocacy priorities and research needs across contexts to ensure more consensual and well-supported relocation practices.

This chapter is about a preventive and self-managed process of relocation of Comunidade Caiçara Enseada da Baleia located in the Island of Cardoso, a conservation Park in São Paulo State, Brazil. The caiçaras are artisanal fishers predominantly residing on the south-eastern coast of the country. After decades of struggling with slow and gradual erosion, a cyclone accelerated those processes, reducing considerably the community’s land and then making it disappear completely. This chapter describes the struggle and resistance in a situation of abandonment, invisibility, and climate injustice inflicted against the community by inactive authorities. The reconstruction process in their new location community, Nova Enseada, was not only physical and environmental but also historical, cultural, and emotional. Putting together the pieces of narrative from an ethnography undertaken amongst the community, this chapter rescues an ancestral remembrance from a process of loss and the conquest of the relocation. Following steps for the future, a reinvigorated sense of community and new values. Further, this contribution aims to preserve the history and memories of the community from a process of self-identification, reflection and projection regarding a place that physically does not exist anymore.

This paper examines the impact of climate change on the mobilities of Brazil's Enseada da Baleia community, particularly their relationship with fish, specifically manjuba (sardines). Facing relocation due to drastic geographical alterations on Cardoso Island, the study, grounded in eight months of ethnographic research and utilizing frameworks from mobility studies and relational ontologies, emphasizes the community's entanglement with fish in overcoming climate change challenges and remaking their world. The article introduces the ‘Mobile Kinship’ concept to explore human-nonhuman relationships in determining mobility patterns after climate impact. As such, this work advocates for integrating a relational perspective into the climate mobility framework, focusing on understanding, and addressing the climate-induced mobilities of non-Western communities.

Adaptation to climate change is currently characterised by ever-increasing costs to maintain the status quo with respect to climate hazards. This gap is worsened by the fiscal austerity that characterises the current political and economic situation in many countries. These cuts reduce societal resilience through neglected public infrastructure, services and civic spaces generating vulnerability to shocks and an everyday lack of opportunity. Here we argue that without addressing economic austerity, the viability of current approaches to adaptation are severely compromised. Thus, engaging with, and shifting, societal values, norms and objectives in decision-making will be central to a more cost-effective and orderly form of adaptation. This requires amplifying the political voice of communities who often lack the power to effect change. In this framing, adaptation goes beyond (but still includes) responding to hazard, placing greater emphasis on investment in people and advancing their wellbeing. Adaptation becomes a political force driving social change and challenging the logic of economic austerity.