Climate change, ideology, special interests and immobility
Climate change in the United States is heavily politicized, contributing to a lack of consensus among decision makers and the public on preventive and remedial actions to address impacts. The content of public policies and solutions are affected by the discourses surrounding climate issues, which are in turn influenced by political ideas and public opinion. Ideas and beliefs about the anthropogenic nature of climate change, its causes and potential solutions, are also shaped by special political and economic interests. This is especially the case in fossil fuel producing states such as Louisiana, where industry interests affect how decision makers conceive of adaptation policies and how they communicate climate risks to the public.
Standing “at ground zero of climate change”, coastal Louisiana is experiencing one of the highest rates of sea-level rise in the world. The causes of Louisiana’s environmental and climatic vulnerabilities are threefold. Climate change has accelerated and intensified sea level rise, marsh loss and climatic events (hurricanes, rain events, and flooding); oil and gas activities have carved canals through the marshes, weakened natural barriers and accelerated land loss; and the leveeing of the Mississippi river has stopped the natural sedimentation of the coast, leading to subsidence, the sinking or caving in of land. Some studies predict that the Mississippi river delta will be underwater by 2100, putting communities and infrastructure along the coast at ever-increasing risk in the years and decades ahead.
However, although mobility can be a useful adaptation strategy in the face of increasing risks, many communities and individuals in Louisiana are compelled to remain in place due to lack of resources and support and insufficient understanding of current and future environmental risks. While cultural attachment to land serves as factor contributing to immobility, politicized views on climate change and insufficient government initiative around relocation are also to blame. The present research, based on interviews and observations in southeast Louisiana between 2020 and 2022, reveals how ideas and perceptions of risk, beliefs which deny or ignore the anthropogenic climate change, and fossil fuel industry and political interests are important factors determining environmental adaptation strategies, including the role of (im)mobility.
Understanding the climate immobility debate
The field of climate mobility research has been dominated by three main objects of study: migration, displacement, and planned relocation. Much focus has been put on understanding the drivers of movement at the expense of discerning the factors which contribute to immobility, whether voluntary or involuntary. Because of this mobility bias, climate immobility was rarely researched in its own right until recently and was predominantly conceptualized as a lack of ability and agency in movement, leading to the discourses of “trapped populations” in the literature.
The 2011 Foresight report, written by six prominent authors in the field of climate migrations, was the first to call attention to trapped populations. Richard Black and his colleagues argued that “millions of people will be unable to move away from locations in which they are extremely vulnerable to environmental change” (p.9). They contended that populations may be “trapped” by their lack of wealth, or economic means, linking the ability to move in the context of climate change to relative wealth.
But this conception of trapped populations suggests that immobility is a negative outcome that may increase vulnerabilities, while mobility is seen as a rational response to climate risk. By emphasizing the economic character of adaptation, this perspective has neglected the role of people’s non-economic interests and aspirations including the preference of some to remain in places that scholars and scientists may consider to be at risk. This overlooking of individual agency and complex psychosocial processes has led to framing immobility as “involuntary” and immobile communities as “falling into poverty traps” (p.563).
More recent research has expanded our understanding of immobility. Populations may desire to ‘stay’ for sociocultural reasons while simultaneously expressing the need to move or the inability to do so, complexifying individual and community decision-making processes. As Schewel has observed, immobility, therefore, can be viewed as voluntary, forced, or acquiescent, with ‘acquiescence’ describing the simultaneous incapacity to leave and the aspiration to remain in place, the “non-resistance to constraints” (p.8).
A survey conducted in Louisiana, for example, reveals that although some may be willing to relocate if “someone cut them a check today” (p.14), others observe that their livelihoods, family ties and attachments to place bind them to their home and inform their adaptation strategies in situ. In other words, decisions to leave or stay are shaped not simply by the availability of resources but also by preferences. Immobility, as Schewel proposes, can therefore be conceived as existing within an aspiration-capability spectrum. As the author points out, “many people who migration theories assume should desire to migrate may not, in fact, wish to do so” (p.9). Challenging the supposed “rationality of movement” in the context of climate change, this perspective recognizes immobility as the interaction of various structural constraints and non-economic considerations as shaping decisions to “to stay”.
Among these constraints and considerations, ideas about climate change can have a consequential impact on community approaches to adaptation. Studies have highlighted the importance of local and individual perceptions of environmental risk in shaping household-level mobility decisions. Individual circumstances interact with the perception of climate change and transform the way information is received, shaped by preexisting beliefs and preferences. Climate change, recognition of its human components and its impacts ultimately inform attitudes – and decisions – on climate action.
Situating Louisiana in the (im)mobility debate: why ideas and perceptions matter
In Louisiana, beliefs and ideas about climate change critically shape adaptation approaches, including those involving (im)mobility. Despite some surveys indicating low levels of concern for climate change, with only 42% of Louisianans believing that global warming will harm them personally and 46% affirming that they would not be harmed at all, other data show that the vast majority of Louisianans are aware of environmental threats, some 91% of respondents believing that flooding will increase in the near future.
Perceptions of the threat of climate change, which vary considerably across and within populations, constitute an essential driver of adaptation decision-making. The public’s perception of environmental threat is often mediated by various psychological and social factors “including personal experience, affect and emotion, imagery, trust, values, and worldviews” (p.1434). Shared values and ideas yield strong emotional reactions to climate change, especially when it threatens “objects of care”. In this sense, ideas and emotions are significantly intertwined, as perceptions of environmental threat both condition and are conditioned by a person’s emotional and ideological dispositions. Perceptions are also mediated by cultural cognition, meaning the unconscious worldviews which filter the way people perceive risk and information and form beliefs about those dangers. This mechanism could explain, for example, why some research has found that living near environmental threats does not necessarily lead to stronger support for pro-environmental regulations.
Ideas and beliefs are therefore particularly important in the context of mobility and could provide hints as to why people do not move despite increasing climate risks. In the United States especially, ideas about climate change have been polarized for a long time, forming a partisan gap in the perception of climate change across political aisles. Climate denialism in particular has been historically constructed through strong ideological pressures from conservatives at various levels of governance. In Louisiana, a fossil fuel-producing state where Republicans have long dominated the political landscape, the issue of climate change has been controversial. Although acknowledgment of its anthropogenic character is slowly increasing among the public and elected leaders according to survey data, acceptance of anthropogenic climate change remains considerably lower in southeast Louisiana than the national average.
Ideas about climate change, the subsequent production of knowledge around coastal issues and the shared interpretations of vulnerability, its causes and extent, have molded adaptation. While the experience of climate change shapes behavior towards risk (people are aware of some risk and adapt accordingly), adaptation strategies also depend on the way people interpret that risk or experience – in this case, as being climate change related or not. Louisianan policymakers have engaged in what can be described as agnostic adaptation, which Katrina Fischer Kuh defines as “adaptation without the why – the divorce of adaptation from knowledge or acceptance of climate change being humans’ fault”, which means that adaptation practices are disconnected from the existence of climate change.
In Louisiana, the problems of land loss, sea-level rise and intensifying hurricanes and floods are often framed in political discourse as “Mother Nature”, “natural” events, or linked to “God”. Relinquishing uncertainty in the outcome of a flood to divine intervention perpetuates the idea that climatic events are beyond human control and exist independently from human arrangements. It contributes to the “spiritualizing” of climate change, described by Hannah Fair as an important epistemological explanation of climate change, which shapes adaptive behaviors in certain local contexts. Similarly, “Mother Nature” imagery, conveyed in various political discourses, disregards historic human impacts on the environment and maintains the sacralization of the non-human world. These interpretations of events, found at the legislative levels in the House and Senate of Louisiana and within local level governments, are anchored in hegemonic Republican beliefs about climate change. They allow elected officials to normalize climate events and downplay their responsibility in long-term systemic adaptation.
How the framing of climate change risk constrains mobility
The way problems are discussed and defined shape policy responses and public framing. Coastal issues in Louisiana have been deliberately depoliticized in order to garner bipartisan support for state-led coastal restoration (i.e., the adoption and implementation of the state’s Coastal Master Plan). In doing so, however, this depoliticization prevents discussions of the causes of climate change (notably fossil fuel production) and the structural foundations of climate vulnerability (environmental degradation, poverty and social marginalization). In fact, the majority of public discourses remain devoid of the mention of climate change. Environmental vulnerability is attributed to naturalized climate hazards and the leveeing of the Mississippi River, which has cut off the natural sedimentation processes of the delta, contributing to land subsidence. The policy solutions offered to resolve these problems are primarily “techno-optimist”, meaning they rely on technological advancements and hurricane-protection infrastructures to mitigate risks. Policy-makers have thus engaged in “business as usual” agnostic adaptation, disregarding relocation or other forms of mobility as valuable strategies.
Thus, how people respond is not driven simply by the direct experience of climate change, as some studies have suggested, but rather how those experiences are interpreted. The naturalization of coastal problems (i.e., seeing them as natural phenomenon independent of anthropogenic climate change) and the adoption of agnostic solutions shape interpretations of future risk and shape adaptation strategies for both governments and communities. Disbelief in climate change – or at the very least, lack of acknowledgment of climate change in policymaking – fundamentally reorients strategies away from relocation and mobility because it fosters a sense of security anchored in the belief in relatively stable and unchanging conditions of vulnerability that can be addressed through infrastructural policies of protection (levees, sea walls, drainage pumps, etc.).
This is because climate change denial and agnostic beliefs reduce the range of policy solutions for adaptation and mitigation based on the belief that humans have not caused and therefore cannot control climate-related events. As a result, techno-optimism offers decision makers and residents “solutions” to remain in place and face current climatic events without consideration of increasing risks and intensifying environmental impacts. Levees, for example, are repeatedly framed as lifesaving and life-enabling in the long-term to ensure the permanence of Louisianans. Infrastructure is also intentionally used to support the repopulation and protection of communities that are unwilling or unable to relocate. Infrastructure projects, therefore, have become the default solutions in the absence of proper policy planning such as institutional capacity for government buyouts of homes in hazardous areas and other forms of adaptation through mobility.
In advancing agnostic adaptation, governments have also pushed market-based mechanisms of resilience, through insurance and the structural elevation of individual homes in areas impacted by sea level rise and storm surge. Downplaying climate risks, local elected officials have encouraged the repopulation of southern areas to preserve economic activities and tax bases. Simultaneously, the lack of state assistance for resettlement has reduced households’ ability to adapt through relocation, creating a policy vacuum around the issue of mobility. Yet, surveys have shown that a quarter of coastal residents have thought about moving from their current home, and many researchers and stakeholders see the inevitability of relocation in the future. But political interests and ideology have been influential in the failure of past climate relocation projects. Researchers have found that the movement of communities has been hampered “for political or philosophical reasons”, the result of the well-established partisan nature of climate change action.
Conclusion
This case study shows that populations can become “trapped” not only because of resource limitations and attachments to land but also by other consequential forces – in particular, political ideology, industry interests and denialistic beliefs around anthropogenic climate change. Because collective and individual perceptions of risk are constructed politically and socially, ideas play an important role in shaping peoples’ climate adaptation strategies. In Louisiana, underlying fossil fuel interests shape adaptation policies for the preservation of economic structures, tax bases, and populations needed for extractivist practices (i.e., a labor force). Simultaneously, Louisianans’ deep place attachments to their lands, constructed historically and informed by their cultural heritages, have favored in situ adaptation. Decision makers’ agnosticism with regards to climate change has also greatly reduced the range of policy options including the planning for long-term and proactive population movements.
In her paper, Schewel described capabilities and aspirations for (im)mobility as existing along a spectrum and rejected the rigidity of distinct mobility categories. Understanding forced, voluntary and acquiescent immobilities as overlapping and the result of the interweaving of interests, ideas and institutions therefore takes us beyond simplistic materialist conceptions of “trapped populations”. Instead, as can be seen in this case study, populations can be “trapped” by various cognitive, emotional, and political processes underlying adaptation decision-making. The question of ‘choice’ in movement is not straightforward because lack of information and public resources limits the opportunity to adapt through mobility. Broadening our views on immobility matters, in terms of scientific knowledge and policy practice and because as the impacts of climate change accelerate and human mobility complexifies, inequalities in adaptive capacities will likely increase.
KEYWORDS: displacement, planned relocation, immobility, climate change, Louisiana
Sarah Munoz is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Montreal, Canada. Specializing in environmental policy, her research focuses on the political construction of adaptation and climate change (im)mobilities. Her PhD thesis analyzes the impacts of interests, ideologies, and infrastructural policies on the adaptation of vulnerable communities in the United States.