- The world’s most vulnerable people, including refugees, migrants and the poor, increasingly face threats related to climate change.
- Many lack the ability to move away from impacts like heat, flooding and landslides.
- A new study reveals a lack of data showing the causes of this involuntary immobility.
- Experts say governments and organizations can invest in low-cost interventions aimed at reducing suffering.
In July 2024, a heat wave swept through the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. The surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 7.5 million people, is known for its mild weather. Only about half of the area’s homes have air-conditioning, according to 2023 census data, compared with more than 90% across the country.
So when coastal areas hit 32° Celsius (90° Fahrenheit) and inland communities breach 43°C (110°F), as they did in mid-2024, it tends to catch people off guard, especially those with few options to escape the high temperatures.
But according to a new study, identifying the people most likely to be harmed by climate change, as well as the forces that trap them in places of high impact, poses real problems for countries, humanitarian groups and researchers.
The research used “a very participatory approach” known as a world café, said Andrew Kruczkiewicz, one of the study’s co-authors and a lecturer at Columbia University. Experts held rotating discussions with groups of their colleagues at a set of tables in a room, discussing vulnerability and mobility in the face of climate change, while keeping notes on what materialized from their conversations. Fourteen of the researchers then assembled the collected ideas into a paper published March 16 in the journal Nature Communications.
In the team’s discussions, “We soon realized we actually don’t really understand who’s vulnerable of not being able to move because of climate disasters,” said Lisa Thalheimer, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. She said she also learned that “immobility and the populations who are rendered involuntarily immobile are so large and varied.”
For example, in Bangladesh, Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar have faced landslides, flooding and other climate-related threats. Elsewhere, people displaced by war, especially in Africa, have to deal with ever-rising temperatures with few, if any, tools to help them cope. The study notes that, by 2050, temperatures in the world’s 15 hottest refugee camps may exceed 30°C (86°F) for 200 or more days a year. And, according to data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, those rises in temperature likely stem from climate change.
Recent research also suggests that tens of millions of people will be forced to move by the loss of land due to climate-related flooding along coasts.
In the Rohingya’s case, research also shows that some people are better able to move than others to deal with the threats confronting them.
“Obviously, women and girls could flee a flood quite differently to a super-agile, 15-year-old young man,” Thalheimer said in an interview.
The team argues that deepening the understanding of what traps people in these situations will better inform policy decisions.
“In many cases, involuntarily immobile populations fall within that most vulnerable category,” Kruczkiewicz told Mongabay. But, he added, “As we show here, we don’t have the appropriate level of detail in terms of data to really fully understand them in a way that respects who they are and their differences.”
Thalheimer said, to her knowledge, that type of data isn’t currently being collected anywhere. That presents challenges for the organizations and governments trying to address intense vulnerability to climate-related disasters.
Examples of low-cost, immediate action exist. As heat waves have become more frequent in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, communities have turned youth centers, libraries and parks into “cooling centers,” where unhoused, undocumented and other vulnerable residents can find respite from the extreme heat.
Responses like this “don’t require major jumps from already what the city is planning,” Laura Kuhl, an associate professor and climate adaptation researcher at Northeastern University in the U.S. “It would just require some targeted acknowledgement that these are particularly vulnerable populations.”
Kuhl, who wasn’t involved in the study, praised the authors’ appreciation of the complexity of climate-related involuntary immobility.
“We know it’s probably a much larger problem than is captured because of the lack of data,” she said.
But while the study works to identify what drives involuntary immobility, focusing on how to solve those problems would also be helpful, Kuhl added.
“There could have been a little more attention to what are adaptation strategies that would really sort of shift those dynamics,” she said, “or what kinds of policy responses could we be putting in place, thinking through loss and damage for those groups, after or even before some of these climate events.”
Kruczkiewicz acknowledged there’s more to be done. “The paper outlines some opportunities and some ideas,” he said. “It’s meant to start a discussion and lead to further work.”
They recommend several potential responses, such as focused data collection to understand the makeup of involuntary immobile groups and what’s trapping them. They also propose an international support mechanism, perhaps to be housed within the United Nations.
The team also writes that the dearth of quality data shouldn’t impede efforts to help involuntary immobile groups cope — and right now.
“When we look at past data from 2007 to 2016, it shows that refugee camps in Africa have already been exposed to heat, and that continues,” Thalheimer said. By 2016, all 15 of the hottest camps had an average of at least 50 days of the hazardous heat stress caused by temperatures warmer than 30°C, for example.
Kuhl said responding to those needs is an opportunity, especially as global politics constricts the availability of climate and humanitarian financial aid from the Global North.
“Relatively small amounts of funding could probably make quite a big impact on reducing vulnerability,” she said.
Indeed, Thalheimer said that addressing involuntary immobility is “low-hanging fruit” because those threatened most by climate change could benefit from comparatively straightforward interventions.
“Yes, it’s a complex and complicated problem,” she said. “But someone needs to start. Someone needs to get the ball rolling.”
Banner image: Drought in Bangladesh. Image by Md Harun Or Rashid / IAPB/VISION 2020 via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
World’s record heat is worsening air pollution and health in Global South
Citation:
Thalheimer, L., Cottier, F., Kruczkiewicz, A., Hultquist, C., Tuholske, C., Benveniste, H., … Horton, R. M. (2025). Prioritizing involuntary immobility in climate policy and disaster planning. Nature Communications, 16(1), 2581. doi:10.1038/s41467-025-57679-9
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