Embracing Immigrant Knowledges for Just Climate Health Adaptation

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Climate change, human health and immigration are arguably the most prominent, enduring, and challenging issues of our times, with important implications for justice. Studies on the nexus of these issues have largely focused on climate change as posing challenges to health and thus acting as a push-factor for migration. However, our understanding of how climate is impacting the health of immigrants in places of migration destination is still poor. Further limiting our understanding of potential climate and health injustices, immigrant communities in Europe are far from homogenous, and are often racialized groups of great ethnic diversity. With IMBRACE, I examine what shapes immigrants’ climate health vulnerability and how their situated knowledges and practices can inform both their own response capacities and urban climate adaptation more broadly, towards more effective and just approaches. I focus on two types of climate impacts, chosen as most relevant for urban areas in Europe and with important implications for health: (a) increased and prolonged heat, and (b) intense rainfall and flooding. I employ a pioneering feminist political ecology approach that combines participatory ethnography, critical discourse and policy analysis, and transdisciplinary knowledge production. Focusing on 6 case-study cities in Europe– I systematically explore tangible and intangible factors and structural drivers of immigrants’ climate health vulnerability, centering and engaging with immigrants as expert knowledge-holders. Mobilizing knowledge that comes with and through immigration, I offer an intersectional justice perspective that considers class, gender, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power and oppression when designing and assessing urban climate and health adaptation policy. This novel, comparative, and in-depth study will open new paths for research at the nexus of climate, health, and immigration, leading to a shift in how we conceptualize and research climate justice.