Environmental Mobilities 1: Coming to Terms with Environmental Determinism

Abstract

This first progress report in a series on environmental mobilities reviews the persistence of environmental determinism—the apparent explanatory power of the environment in the context of human mobility—and recent efforts to understand the persistence. It reports on how environmental mobilities continue to be characterized by environmental determinism in weak forms, but that attempts to disentangle it are being made from multiple perspectives, including political ecology, mobilities studies, and social habitability studies. Greater focus on micro-scale and social factors, as well as cross-scalar factors and political factors, are methodologically important as is reflexivity and transparency on assumptions about causality.

Introduction

Entanglements of human movement and environment are the focus of environmental mobilities. This is the first progress report on environmental mobilities in Progress in Environmental Geography, and it explores research on ongoing presence of environmental determinism within environmental mobilities. Apparent explanatory power of the environment in the context of human mobility has been particularly entwined in research on human mobility in the context of climate change, which is a diverse and rapidly growing area, although this explanatory power is not always acknowledged or problematized (Baldwin 2022; Vigil 2024). A small but growing area of investigation within environmental mobilities seeks to account for and unsettle environmental determinism in environmental mobilities, often from a political ecology perspective (Bayrak, Hsu, and Hung 2024; Cottier et al. 2022; Turner et al. 2025). Critical mobilities studies (such as Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019) and habitability studies (such as Sterly et al. 2025) that center environmental mobilities are offering new approaches that can also advance the disentanglement of environmental mobilities from environmental determinism.

Environmental determinism—when the environment is considered the sole or primary driver of human action—has long plagued geography as a discipline, despite being discredited, including a significant revival in the climate crisis (Hulme 2011; Piguet 2013). Although perhaps never fully accepted, environmental determinism has likewise never been fully expunged from geography, even though environmental deterministic ideas among early geographers such as Semple and Huntington have been widely condemned for their stereotyping of people living in certain environments, and hence racism (Ernste and Philo 2009). Indeed, environmental mobilities as a field of study originally assumed a strong environmentally determinist effect of climate on human migration and grew in lockstep with climate change science. This strong environmental determinism has since been agreed to be unfounded on empirical and methodological grounds, giving rise to an acceptance of “multicausality” (Gemenne 2013; van der Geest et al. 2023). In other words, much, if not most, environmental mobilities scholarship has moved on from strong environmental determinism to prima facie accept that environmental factors do not simply cause human mobility and express (if not effectively deploy) a largely undisputed environmental mobility theory that human movement in a changing environment is always multicausal, involving a range of economic, social, and political factors (Bettini 2014; Nicholson 2014). Environmental determinism is thus currently perceived in environmental mobilities as a legacy methodological issue, but with no credible theoretical foundation (Gemenne 2013). Despite this orthodoxy, a range of critical environmental mobilities studies suggest in varied ways that methodological considerations and stated commitments to multicausality are insufficient for the field to come to terms politically with a lingering structural environmental determinism, and that environmental mobilities continues to be characterized by environmental determinism in weak forms (Baldwin 2022; Bayrak, Hsu, and Hung 2024; Hunter and Simon 2023; Vigil 2024). Even the label “environmental mobilities” itself could be critiqued for normatively elevating environmental over other factors.

This paper reviews critical efforts to understand as political, not only methodological, the intertwining of environmental mobilities and environmental determinism, exploring reflexive approaches to the structural reproduction of environmental determinism and an emergent theoretical and methodological plurality. Significant inroads are being made, not only into understanding how and why environmental determinism remains entangled in environmental mobilities scholarship, but into developing conceptual approaches to assist in their disentanglement.

Strong Deterministic Origins

Hulme (2011) wrote a seminal paper on environmental determinism's specific revival in the context of climate change, describing attempts to understand the environment and society as subject to two distinct fallacies. These are environmental determinism, where the environment is elevated to dominant predictor and cause of social dynamics, and environmental indeterminism, where the environment is stripped of explanatory power. While environmental indeterminism plagued social sciences beyond geography for many years, a shift towards environmental determinism occurred as part of rising interest in climate change across the natural and social sciences in the last few decades (Hulme 2011; Hunter and Simon 2023; Piguet 2013). The first attempts to define and predict migration in a changing climate occurred before the turn of the twenty-first century, a time when environmental factors had been, for many decades, mostly excluded from migration and demographic research more broadly, and when climate change science was undergoing significant and rapid development (Hunter and Simon 2023; Piguet 2013). The absence of existing research on the migration-environment nexus seemed to provide a kind of blank slate, and environmental determinism easily found a footing there (Hulme 2011). The first climate migration models, for example, assumed simplistically and incorrectly that most people heavily impacted by climate change would move away from their homes (Gemenne 2011). Environmental mobility was initially and incorrectly isolated as a distinct and new migration category, set apart from global migration dynamics, the nature and magnitude of which was thought to be determined by environmental changes only (Gemenne 2013). Research at that stage was poorly attuned to existing migration theory and mobilities studies (Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; de Sherbinin et al. 2022; Hunter and Simon 2023). Early climate mobilities, in sum, relied on a strong environmental determinism that Hulme (2011) described as “climate reductionism,” with climate posited as “the one ‘known’ in an otherwise unknowable future” (Hulme 2011, 249).

It has been well-covered in environmental mobilities literature that early, climate deterministic work on climate mobility futures did not reflect the complexity of the societies in which climate change impacts are felt (de Sherbinin et al. 2022). An emergence of context-specific, often qualitative empirical studies exploring this complexity led to widespread questioning and rejection of climate deterministic findings, and an ostensible acceptance of multicausality. Along with vast improvements in modeling human mobility associated with environmental change, and an increasing incorporation of migration theories into environmental mobility research, the field's methodological and theoretical rigor became significantly enhanced (Bettini 2014; Schewel et al. 2024). These developments were largely believed to leave strong environmental determinism in the field's past, even while it remained frequently commented upon by analysts that environmental determinism problematically lived on in sections of the media, policy, and public opinion due to the early deterministic models and remains, it is widely acknowledged, embedded in these (Betts and Pilath 2017; Gemenne 2013). In research itself, however, environmental determinism was considered solved, bolstered by an assumption that environmental determinism is logically impossible if human mobility is understood as multicausal.

That logic, however, is being questioned, with concerns raised that environmental determinism has not been effectively banished in environmental mobilities research. It is not, as often believed, confined to overly simplistic projections of climate migrants (de Sherbinin et al. 2022; Hunter and Simon 2023; Schewel et al. 2024). A small, but rich and innovative, area of environmental mobilities research is considering if and how contemporary environmental mobilities have indeed effectively ejected environmental determinism, or whether it remains embedded in the study of environmental mobilities (Baldwin 2022; Baldwin and Waters 2025; Bayrak, Hsu, and Hung 2024). Environmental determinism has, in fact, been argued to be hiding in plain sight, with political ecologists such as Turner et al. (2025) considering that there is an ongoing tendency within environmental mobilities to treat causal relationships between climate and migration as “common knowledge” at the expense of “rigorous empirical studies evaluating the causal relationship between climate parameters and migration” (Turner et al. 2025). Nicholson (2014) points out a tendency in environmental mobilities research to acknowledge definitional difficulty, which then is often internally contradicted in deployment of a chosen concept of environmental mobility as if its definitional complexity did not exist (Baldwin 2022). In recent studies, environmental mobility has been defined extremely broadly, capturing mobilities irrespective of whether or not environmental factors are the most important determinants, and irrespective of whether environmental factors result in an increase or decrease in mobility (eg, Schewe and Beyer 2025). Several studies point out that lack of conceptual clarity is one element of a series of normative choices that tend to conceptually and methodologically prioritize environmental over social drivers, without reflexivity regarding such normative choices (Baldwin 2022; Cottier et al. 2022; Daoust and Selby 2024; Vigil 2024). Such deterministic normative choices also include under-theorization of social drivers, which are too often approached as both apolitical and ahistorical, and insufficient attention paid to differences across scale (Cottier et al. 2022; Vigil 2024).

Current Determinism

Bayrak, Hsu, and Hung (2024) explicitly examined environmental determinism in a meta-analysis of research on human mobility in two global hotspots of climate change impacts—the Greater Mekong and Ganges-Brahmaputra delta regions—from 2015 to 2020, a period after which environmental determinism had been clearly identified as problematic, and supposedly rejected from environmental mobilities research. This metanalysis found that 40 per cent of the studies sampled did in fact display environmental determinism, either through directly referring to “climate migration” or “climate-induced migration” without clearly explaining how climate played a role in people's mobility patterns, or through adopting discredited definitions which imply a direct and causal relationship between environmental change and mobility (Bayrak, Hsu, and Hung 2024). The same study found just over five per cent used a definition that identified multiple drivers of mobility. Bayrak et al.'s study is of interest not only for its substantive findings, but because it is rare: possibly the only meta-analysis to date of environmentally determinist patterns in environmental mobilities research.

Other studies have been helpful in explaining why environmental determinism remains embedded in environmental mobilities. Work by Cottier et al. (2022) highlights a lack of methodological reflexivity on environmental determinism. From a political ecology perspective, Cottier et al. (2022) detect environmental determinism emerging from the practice of conceptualizing and deploying causal relationships as independent of any normative choices made in attempts to study them. They point out that “a statement that a climate event causes a social outcome is not an objective scientific fact. It is a choice of variable weights (including presumptions about which variables are ‘active’ or ‘given’) that are implicit in [an] analytic frame.” They explain the normative choices that relate to two different framings, “environmental-drivers,” and “social-causality.” The former takes social conditions as given and examines the impacts of an environmental event in a particular setting, while the latter holds a climate hazard constant while explaining the social causes of the arrangements the hazard find in the setting. Cottier et al.'s (2022) study positions both “environmental-drivers” and “social-causality” as valid frames, but make the point that neither is value-neutral. However, in environmental mobilities scholarship, it has been observed that an environmental-drivers frame is more likely to be chosen at the expense of exploring social factors, with environmental determinism becoming embedded in an accumulation of environmental-drivers studies, exacerbated by an absence of reflexivity on why an environment-driver frame is so prominent (Cottier et al. 2022; Vigil 2024).

Reflexivity about assumptions and methodology is important to account for, rather than sidestep, ongoing environmental determinism. Several studies have considered the intense interest in locating an “environmental signal” in human mobility. Hunter and Simon (2023) detect in this interest a temptation toward environmental determinism. Baldwin and Waters (2025) raise the issue of intuition about environmental factors driving major new patterns of human mobility leading to it entering into common sense. They are alert to a “sense or gut feeling one has that climate change is a mounting migration crisis …. for many the logic that climate change will catalyze new patterns of migration is so irrefutable that it now circulates as common sense. Intuition fuels this common sense along with the demand for solutions.” Environmental mobilities analysts thus may be acting on intuition over reasoning or evidence when they prioritize an environmental driver frame over a social-causality one.

On entering into the “common-sense” of experts and public alike, a widely accepted truth-like quality to environmentally determined human mobilities has emerged (Baldwin and Waters 2025). Yet there may in fact be no environmentally determined mobile subject in the world “waiting to be counted,” as the apparent existence of something called environmental mobility has been argued to be a product of ingenuity and research techniques, such as statistical inference and datasets, rather than a phenomenon that is observable in the field, picking up on earlier studies that also raised the issue of empirical elusiveness of environmentally mobile subjects (Baldwin 2022; Nicholson 2014). Baldwin and Waters (2025) explore the “environmental migrant” as an effect of intuition and knowledge practices, such as modeling, that “seek to discern what they already presume to know in advance” (Baldwin and Waters 2025). Currently, Baldwin (2022) argues, there remain too many “speculative reading(s) of a speculative phenomenon too excessive to define, let alone govern, yet too freighted with meaning not to” (Baldwin 2022).

In the midst of these debates, environmental mobilities has emerged as a keen-to-be established field of research, with its own journal, professional networks, and conferences, as well as strong links to policy, bolstered by a perceived need for clear and simple policy responses to an issue with rising political traction. Nash (2018a, 2018b) examines the policy arena in relation to environmental mobility knowledge production, finding a self-perpetuating cycle between research and policy that treats links between environment and human mobility as already established, with elite actors within processes such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defining the conceptual and political parameters through which particular types of knowledge of environmental mobilities gain authority, attract funding and become used in policy processes (Nash 2018a, 2018b). It is common, for instance, to appeal to more empirical study to locate populations of environmental migrants, despite concerns about environmental mobilities’ conceptual indeterminacy, and seemingly influenced by the subject's political currency. Environmentally mobilities research is clearly part of an “extensive recalibration of power in response to the climate crisis” (Baldwin and Waters 2025). At present, the environmental mobilities policy-research nexus does not necessarily well-reflect environmental mobilities as an emerging, and always political system of meaning and sense-making, with attendant power relations, enriched by perspectives from critical race theories, feminist theories, and decolonial theories (Baldwin 2022; Vigil 2024). These types of issues will be explored more deeply in two future reviews of environmental mobilities literature. The remaining sections of this review focus on critical mobilities studies and habitability studies that offer new possibilities for disentangling environmental mobilities from environmental determinism.

Untangling Determinism from a Mobilities Perspective

A growing area of critical research in environmental mobilities draws on existing, well-established mobilities scholarship (Blondin 2022; Boas et al. 2022; Cundill et al. 2021; Durand-Delacre 2022; Everuss 2023; Parsons 2019; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019; Yumagulova et al. 2023). The mobilities paradigm, with its emphasis on mobilities as a fundamental characteristic of all social life, shaped by power relations and historical and cultural contexts was—perhaps surprisingly—somewhat neglected when research on the environment and human mobility was taking shape. However, that neglect is now being addressed, and mobilities studies are helping to expand environmental mobilities beyond its focus on drivers of mobility. A mobilities approach can help to focus on the diverse practices and meanings of mobility in conditions of environmental change and examine how these are embedded in structural relations of power (Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019). The approach has, for example, been useful in identifying and understanding political, emotional, and cultural factors, such as place attachment, that shape intentions to stay in climate-impacted areas (Ekoh, Teron, and Ajibade 2023). The mobilities approach unsettles understandings of social life as fundamentally sedentarist and insists that human movement occurs in a dynamic space where ideas, things, knowledge, risks, and so on are also moving in addition to environmental change (Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019). Concepts such as mobility justice, in turn, can be considered in relation to the complex workings of power in a climate changing world (Sheller 2018). A recognition that the earth itself is dynamic, that human and non-human forms of mobility are relational, means that environmental mobilities can in turn inform the study of mobilities (Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019). The mobilities approach assists in decentering environmental determinism by focusing on environmental mobilities as social and political through new concepts such as environmental mobility regimes. Building on the concept of mobility regimes as interconnected sets of socio-economic and political relations consisting of different types of actors, environmental mobility regimes frame, manage, and regulate the nexus between mobilities and environmental change, resulting in particular modes of governing of environmental mobilities (Boas et al. 2022).

Untangling Determinism from Social Habitability Studies Perspective

What might be considered a “social habitability turn” in environmental mobilities scholarship is also providing much-needed theoretical and methodological innovation, including tools to move beyond environmental determinism (Horton et al. 2021; Sterly et al. 2025). In social habitability studies, social change and habitability change are positioned relationally, requiring a detailed understanding of relations in a particular context before assumptions can be inserted about the environment's role in mobility. Habitability is understood as socially and environmentally constituted, but also, crucially, as socially differentiated, conditioned by macro, meso, and micro factors, and playing out at the micro level. For example, migration shaped perceptions of habitability in a rural community in Northern Ghana in culturally specific ways. A contextual approach to understanding habitability as subjective revealed in that context that outward and return migration patterns for a community experiencing environmental challenges could, at a community scale, strengthen socio-cultural characteristics such as community cohesion and place attachment. Such factors led to adaptive action towards improving local habitability and resulted in perceptions of improved habitability (Janoth et al. 2024).

Social habitability studies have traced some environmental determinism in environmental mobilities to climate risk assessments, as the complex conditions that may result in human mobility in contexts of climate-related hazards are routinely overlooked in methodological choices that privilege single hazards, natural science datasets and methods, quantitative approaches, and a reliance on apparently generalizable assumptions for global and regional scales (Horton et al. 2021). In such top-down approaches to climate risk, social science understandings of local vulnerability and adaptive capacity, from disciplines such as anthropology, tend to have a limited role, if any. Hence such approaches are unable to account for the culturally and historically specific ways in which human agency is exercised in response to environmental change in households and local institutions, including those that lead, or do not lead, to mobility. Thus climate risk assessments tend to present an overly simplified version of what is happening on the ground, with mobility often assumed to be one of few adaptation options, without drawing on contextual, bottom-up studies to test or confirm this assumption (Horton et al. 2021; Sterly et al. 2025).

The social habitability approach goes further than advocating for bottom-up approaches to complement top-down climate risk assessments. Sterly et al. (2025) draw attention to power relations, worldviews, and self-reflexivity in habitability research, ethical accountability to studied populations, and a commitment to methodological and theoretical pluralism. In the social habitability approach, the scale of analysis is recognized as being just as much a normative choice as a methodological one (Vigil 2024). While these developments are very new, and habitability studies itself has a legacy of environmental determinism which needs further unpacking, a social habitability approach shows significant potential for disentangling environmental mobilities scholarship from some of its normative choices to focus on environmental over social drivers of human movement, putting in place the interdisciplinary building blocks that can lead to transdisciplinarity, and using evidence in preference to generalized assumptions and intuition.

Conclusion

Coming to terms with a continuing influence of environmental determinism in environmental mobilities is an unfinished project. In this report, the focus has been on literature that traces environmental determinism as a political issue shaping environmental mobilities scholarship itself, despite claims that environmental determinism is only a legacy. While political ecologists interested in environmental change and human mobility have long been producing critical work on the relation between them, and highlighting the power relations on the ground, the field remains characterized by environmentally determinist normative choices that continue to shape its undertakings as well as its public understanding and inclusion into policy. Social habitability studies and mobilities studies both have much to offer environmental mobilities, and progress has already been made in both to attend to the lingering problem of environmental determinism. There is still significant empirical and conceptual work ahead. It seems in particular that the research-policy nexus needs to be approached differently.

It may be unrealistic to expect elimination of environmental determinism, but minimizing it is both desirable and possible (Hunter and Simon 2023). Perhaps there remain misunderstandings that positing multicausality when elevating the environment can still constitute environmental determinism, albeit weak environmental determinism. But weak environmental determinism is still environmental determinism. Causality itself can be understood not as an objective, observable force but as, Cottier et al. (2022) put it “a choice of variable weights.” Recognizing the politics of all forms of study of environmental mobilities—and thereby strengthening the transparency and accountability of whichever method is chosen—is something that is only emerging in environmental mobilities scholarship. Reflexivity about normative choices made when undertaking particular types of study is becoming of increasing importance. No longer are the most cutting-edge researchers in environmental mobilities relying on their methodological rejection of environmental determinism, they are also demonstrating their understanding of the structural problem of environmental determinism, and how their own work makes progress in dismantling it.