Call for papers

Climate change is increasingly reshaping mobility and immobility along the world’s coasts—dynamic land–seascapes where livelihoods, identities, and futures are closely tied to environmental change. Coastal and island communities face intersecting pressures from sea‑level rise, erosion, salinisation, flooding, shifting fisheries and farming, and extreme events that do not simply trigger movement, but rework the conditions for staying, leaving, circulating, or returning. Mobility and immobility along coasts form a continuum, raising questions about who moves or remains, under what conditions, and how movement by some enables (im)mobility for others across generations, genders, and livelihoods.

This themed collection seeks to deepen understanding of climate‑ and environment‑related mobilities across diverse coastal socio-ecological systems, from highly protected and governed temperate coasts to rapidly changing arctic, atoll, and deltaic environments. We invite contributions that examine how climate change intensifies existing coastal mobility patterns while also generating new, often under‑acknowledged forms of movement and constraint. Topics of interest include typologies and classifications that capture the wide range of ways people move or don’t move; attribution of environmental change in mobility decision‑making; spatial and temporal dimensions of relocation; multi‑stage and onward movements; and the roles of states, communities, and international actors in shaping present and future coastal land‑ and seascapes.

We particularly encourage community‑led, co‑produced, and innovative contributions that foreground coastal voices and lived experience. In this call for papers, we are interested in all article types accepted into this journal, which can be found here, as well as community-driven papers that may stand on the outlines of what we usually publish, as long as the scientific rationale behind them remains strong.

For examples of topics we are interested in, please see the bullet points below:

• Governance and socioeconomic conditions during/before/after movement
• How (im)mobility reshapes territories' and communities' futures
• Economic migration
• Cultural reasons in indigenous communities for choosing to move or not to move, and pressures placed on those communities
• Methodological innovations to capture mobility and immobility
• Relationship of intersectionality between mobility and immobility
• Socio-ecological interactions between sea and land, and mobility/immobility
• Subsistence-dependent communities and their relationship with mobility/immobility (including fishing, farming, etc)
• Climate change impact on mobility/immobility: emergence of new forms of (im)mobility
• Future scenarios of mobility/immobility, if any
• Biodiversity
• Nature-based solutions aimed at reducing mobilities

 

Submission deadline: 4th January 2027

Lead Guest Editor

Professor Emily Boyd, Lund University, Sweden.

Guest Editors:

Dr Shona Koren Paterson, Brunel University of London, UK, Editor of Cambridge Prisms: Coastal Futures.

Professor Virginie K.E. Duvat, Research Laboratory LIENSs (Littoral Environment Societies), La Rochelle University-CNRS, France; French University Institute; Cawthron Institute, Nelson, New Zealand.

Dr Elisabeth Gilmore, Carleton University, Canada.