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Bergen Summer Research School
Breakfast seminar

Climate Change and Migration: Frontline Challenges

A discussion with Maxine Burkett (University of Hawai’i at Mānoa) and Ann Singleton (WUN/IOM) moderated by Edvard Hviding (BSRS Scientific Director).

Kiribati 2005
A family on the South Pacific island of Kiribati, pull themselves from the high waves of the 'king tide' which hit the atoll in February 2005.
Photo:
Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/AP/NTB Scanpix

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Maxine Burkett (UH Mānoa), Ann Singleton (WUN/IOM) and Edvard Hviding (UiB)

The relationships between the local and regional effects of global climate change and processes of migration and displacement are at the forefront of discussion in many fields of research and policy. In this breakfast seminar, two distinguished scholars in climate change law and migration studies meet to explore the past, present and future challenges of human mobility and a changing climate. 

What predictions can be made of emerging interactions between the global climate crisis and human migration, as manifested in different parts of the world? What legal mechanisms exist, or must be developed, to handle these processes? How can the sensitive, entangled and contested concept of “climate change refugee” be addressed by scholarship and policy?   

Maxine Burkett is a Professor of Law at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. An expert in the law and policy of climate change, she has written extensively in diverse areas of climate change law with a particular focus on climate justice—exploring policy responses to climate change’s impacts on vulnerable communities. She has been widely cited, including in BBC Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Nature Climate Change.

Ann Singleton is Vice-Chair of the Understanding Cultures Global Challenge of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) and Senior Adviser to the IOM‘s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC), Berlin. Her work focuses on international migration data, the production of knowledge on migration and the development of migration and asylum policy. She advises the UN Statistics Division, the IOM, European Commission, national governments, NGOs and international organizations.

Edvard Hviding is Professor of Social Anthropology at UiB and the founding director of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group. He is also an Honorary Adjunct Professor of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. He has been an adviser to UNESCO on education and environment in the Solomon Islands and is frequently engaged as a regional expert by Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, both on visits to the Pacific region, and at events of science diplomacy at the United Nations.

This seminar is open to all!