CIDRARC is a research partnership on climate displacement funded by SSHRC of Canada and hosted by the School of Cities

Climate Displacement & Cities

CIDRARC is the Global Research Network on Climate-Induced Displacement, Resettlement, Adaptation, and Resilience for Cities, a research partnership, hosted by the School of Cities, that connects a team of international social and physical scientists and practitioners to refine our understanding of human decisions about adaptation and migration, as well as the adaptive capacities of different groups and infrastructures across contexts.

The goal of CIDRARC is to build greater understanding of how climate displacement plays out in different contexts based on the interplay of individual and institutional perceptions and management of risk.

Research team: Isabelle Anguelovski, Amalia Calderón-Argelich, Lisa Hannuschke

Background

Climate- and weather-related displacement of people is a growing concern worldwide. Between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change, and millions are displaced each year due to sudden disasters such as flooding and fire, slow-onset land degradation, and social unrest caused by resources scarcity.

The challenges for cities are immense – the involuntary migration caused by climate and weather brings with it overloaded infrastructure, inadequate access to affordable housing, social tensions, increased poverty, and inequality.

Objectives

  • to identify how local embodied knowledge in urban regions informs climate adaptation through the lens of displacement in different contexts;
  • to develop new measures of climate migration;
  • to build communities of practice and tools to help different types of cities, from core to periphery, cope with climate displacement and its related inequities and vulnerabilities.

CIDRARC emerged in 2023 out of two workshops funded by a SSHRC Connections Grant and led by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Boston University’s Initiative on Cities (read the summary report). In Spring 2024, SSHRC awarded CIDRARC a Partnership Development Grant, which supported research including eight case studies (Barcelona, Boston, Capetown, Costa Rica, Karachi, Kelowna, Melbourne, Toronto).

The leadership team includes: