Immobility in contexts of environmental and climate change has gained increasing importance in the environmental mobilities research field, with staying decisions typically characterised in the binary terms of voluntariness and involuntariness. This paper explores, first, how it may be analytically complex to retain binary understandings of immobility by showing how staying preferences can be marked by both choice and constraints. Second, it explores a wider understanding of voluntariness in immobility decisions, as one moving beyond the simple idea of non-coercion to account for the ends that staying serves in people’s life projects, and their access to subjectively defined alternatives. Empirically, it draws on a qualitative study in the deltaic island of Mousuni in eastern India, where recurring cyclones, coastal floods and erosion threaten smallholder agrarian livelihoods. Moving beyond a binary characterisation, it offers a differentiated understanding of staying preferences by identifying intermedial immobility categories that reflect subjective narratives surrounding how people cope with land and livelihood losses, ties to home and community, intra-household divisions of labour, and local perceptions of a ‘good life’.
Coastal social-ecological systems worldwide face regionally differentiated impacts of global environmental change, with agriculture-dependent livelihoods among the most exposed. In coastal Bangladesh, farmers confront intensifying salinity intrusion, waterlogging and extreme weather events. Crop and farming-system diversification is used as an adaptation strategy, yet systematic evidence on its types, drivers and outcomes in these contexts remains limited. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this systematic review identified diversification strategies in coastal Bangladesh and applied the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework to assess system-level drivers and outcomes. A total of 95 studies were synthesised (89 from database searches of Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar; 6 from manual reference chaining). Five groups of recurrent strategies were identified: (i) integrated agriculture–aquaculture and farm-enterprise diversification, (ii) aquaculture-driven land-use change and farming-system diversification, (iii) stress-tolerant crop adaptation, (iv) community-based agroecological diversification and (v) cropping-pattern and management adjustments. Climate variability and salinity intrusion were the most frequently reported driver and pressure, respectively, characterising diversification as primarily defensive rather than market-driven adaptation. While diversification was reported to enhance income stability and risk management, benefits appeared unevenly distributed, with access mediated by capital constraints. Evidence remains limited regarding locally led adaptation dynamics, scalability and unintended consequences. Strengthening coastal resilience may benefit from context-specific, systems-oriented approaches integrating farmer innovation, appropriate technologies, institutional support and equitable access. This DPSIR-based synthesis should offer transferable insights for climate-vulnerable coastal social-ecological systems globally.
China’s dual-carbon agenda has elevated blue carbon from a broad ecological aspiration to an actionable policy domain requiring accounting standards, measurement, reporting and verification (MRV), and institutional implementation pathways. This article examines how blue carbon policies are made operational in China, focusing on the institutional and technical devices through which marine carbon sinks are rendered calculable, verifiable and governable. Drawing on Jasanoff’s notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, it treats blue carbon not as a pre-given natural–technical object, but as a policy object iteratively defined, quantified, verified and recalibrated through policy narratives, standardisation, methodological rule-making and local experimentation. Methodologically, the study combines thematic analysis of national and coastal local policy documents, standards, accounting guidelines and regional methodologies with semi-structured interviews with 12 domain experts across policy, research and market-facing practice. Four findings emerge. First, blue carbon is constructed as a governable climate space, with standardisation functioning as metrological infrastructure. Second, implementation follows a two-wheel structure in which national policy direction and unified accounting grammars are made operable through local devices such as platforms, carbon-inclusion schemes, funds, insurance and judicial compensation. Third, market-facing implementation depends less on willingness to trade than on whether methodologies and MRV systems can institutionalise uncertainty into verifiable rules at bearable cost. Fourth, structural bottlenecks—cross-department coordination, uneven local capacity and unresolved risk allocation—shape credibility and scalability. The article contributes a mechanism-oriented account of how blue carbon moves from policy ambition to institutional operation under uncertainty.
This paper draws on blue justice scholarship to examine how inequalities are intensified as small forage fish move between “fish as food” and “fish as feed,” highlighting distributional justice as a key lens for understanding pressures on fisheries-based households. Forage fish, which can be consumed in diverse forms or diverted into aquafeed (including direct feed and fishmeal), are contested resources among artisanal fishers, fish processors, and small producer fish farmers in Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap region. We show how declining forage fish populations—driven by overfishing, environmental change, and aquaculture’s demand for feed—reshape livelihoods, including women’s post-harvest work, and exacerbate social inequities by redirecting an important food source away from low-income populations.
Climate change operates not merely as an ecological stressor but as a fundamental social re-ordering process, reshaping power structures, redistributing vulnerability and reconfiguring governance in marginalised communities. Despite growing recognition of the social dimensions of climate change, the cumulative socio-psychological effects of repeated rather than singular climate events remain underexplored, particularly in under-resourced contexts of the Global South. This study presents empirical findings from a convergent mixed-methods investigation conducted across six climate-vulnerable communities in Pakistan’s Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) provinces. Data were collected from 420 household survey respondents, 35 semi-structured interview participants and 100 focus group discussion participants across ten groups, complemented by fourteen months of systematic participant observation and a longitudinal archival review of forty documents spanning 2000 to 2023. Drawing on Social-Ecological Systems (SES) theory, Social Vulnerability Theory and Collective Memory Theory, the study examines three interlocking processes: risk perception recalibration under climate stress, collective memory’s role in shaping adaptation decisions and informal governance evolution across gender, generational and socio-economic lines. Structural equation modelling indicated that collective memory is the strongest predictor of adaptive behaviour (β = 0.43, p < 0.001), operating both directly and through two statistically significant mediation pathways: risk perception (indirect β = 0.11, p < 0.001) and informal governance participation (indirect β = 0.105, p < 0.01). Women, despite comprising between 55 and 64
