Presentation short abstract

Using a Feminist Political Ecology approach, this paper examines ways sand extraction and development projects in Zambales produce environmental and climate (im)mobilities, revealing how power and human-nature entanglements shape vulnerability and displacement.

Presentation long abstract

(Im)mobilities in the context of environmental and climate change are deeply complex and context-specific, yet too often simplified in policy and research. In this paper, I use a case study in Zambales, in the Philippines, to explore ways a Feminist Political Ecology approach can bridge climate factors with other human-produced environmental factors to offer a more comprehensive understanding of climate mobility beyond climate, while emphasizing the intergenerational, embodied impacts on communities, and the differentiated gendered experiences of mobility.

Specifically, this paper highlights how development projects in Zambales surrounding sand ecologies and extraction, shaped by global structures of power, can create spaces of vulnerability that both contribute to and amplify environmental and climate change, including disasters. It also shows how climate and environmental change can become a scapegoat that justifies further development projects, which in turn increase climate change risks, such as landslides and floods during typhoons, thereby putting people at a higher risk of displacement and labeling them under the umbrella of “climate migration”.

Ultimately, this paper argues for a more situated and politicized understanding of climate mobility through the lens of Feminist Political Ecology, as the environment is always a co-production of natural and human processes, both of which are deeply entangled. As an apolitical and ahistorical analysis of climate mobility is at risk of reproducing the very vulnerabilities it seeks to address, I argue that this approach is not only relevant but also necessary.