In the following comparative analysis, I induce overarching propositions regarding the well-being impacts of climate (im)mobilities. To increase the validity of the propositions, I use the full empirical evidence base generated from the three case studies. The case studies on the highlands, rainforest, and coastal zone of Peru had similar starting points in terms of the inhabitants’ livelihoods, climate vulnerabilities, and exposure. However, they involved varied hazards and (im)mobilities with dissimilar numbers of people and spatiotemporal pathways. Moreover, different structural settings created a wide array of improvement, distress, and survival conditions for (im)mobilities. Finally, migratory agency differed across the cases and led to dynamics ranging from more voluntary to clearly forced instances of migration or immobility. Table 8.1 contrasts the configurations of the key variables of the conceptual framework devised in chapter 2 in the case studies. By comparing the three different cases, I identify resemblances and divergences regarding the well-being impacts of climate (im)mobilities and mechanisms of action. I then distill these differences and similarities into propositions that can be applied beyond the contexts studied here and tested in future research.

Table 8.1 Key migration and immobility variables in the case studies
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1 Well-being Impacts

In the subsequent descriptive analysis, I contrast the net well-being impacts in the three case studies, compare the results within and across the four well-being axes, and explain how the effects evolved.

First, the studied (im)mobilities led to a range of total well-being outcomes, with more net-negative than net-positive results on average. Building on the case studies and other work (Bonanno et al. 2011; Seebauer & Winkler 2020a), I classified and located all the results on a spectrum of five well-being Ideal types (Figure 8.1). Most severely harmed were the survival migrants after the Coastal El Niño and the trapped farmers in the Sierra, who had completely lost their glacial meltwater; these villagers suffered a tailspin into severe ill-being. Achieving mainly negative but marginally better results than these two groups were most migrants from the Sierra and the trapped farmers in the Selva (V4), who were deadlocked in a worsening state of life. Many stayers in the Sierra village affected by mid-stage glacier retreat displayed well-being levels between deterioration and stagnancy. Similar to this group, but on the more positive side of the spectrum, were the Selva farmers who were eventually relocated and fared between stagnancy or return to baseline and fragile advances. Finally, a few migrants from the Sierra who had moved under comparatively better conditions experienced incremental but fragile advances in well-being. No group reached eventual, genuine well-being.

Figure 8.1
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Spectrum of well-being Ideal types and outcomes of studied groups. (Note: Created by the author)

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Second, these net totals should not conceal the multilayered nature of people’s well-being outcomes. The heatmap in Figure 8.2 tabulates the qualitative results of chapters 5–7 and portrays the well-being impacts observed across the analyzed groups. In chapter 7, the statistical analyses corroborated the qualitative results for those well-being dimensions for which data was available.

Figure 8.2
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Heatmap of well-being outcomes. (Note: Qualitative results were ranked on a scale from 1 (negative) to 9 (positive) and then color coded. Created by the author)

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The heatmap illustrates that obtaining development from a secure base and a space to live better were challenging for most groups. Since these first two objective well-being (OWB) components mostly changed in similar directions (despite important exceptions in one or two sub-variables, such as safety from hazards), it seems that bidirectional effects existed between them. For example, migrants who lacked income were also less likely to be able to fulfill other needs such as housing; simultaneously, a lack of basic services such as water or sanitation hindered livelihood, health, and educational advances. Overall, the best outcomes were achieved in social relatedness, which proved neutral to positive for most groups and did not worsen even in severely adverse settings. While social ties contributed to OWB and subjective well-being (SWB), for example by buffering losses, they remained remarkably unaffected by changes in the other two OWB axes, which points to partially separate mechanisms of action. Finally, SWB mainly changed in a direction similar to OWB, and, accordingly, most groups’ SWB tended to decline. It seems that development from a secure base and a space to live better had a joint strong impact on SWB, while social relatedness had moderating effects. However, because some migrants had worse SWB results than key OWB variables would predict and vice versa, it is critical to measure both OWB and SWB. To conclude, most well-being impacts converged within and across the studied axes for the various groups, but a small number of significant divergences were observed. Figure 8.3 summarizes these possible directions of interactions between the well-being axes.

Figure 8.3
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Approximate directions of interactions between well-being components. (Note: Created by the author)

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Third, the varied (im)mobilities had different well-being impacts over time. To begin with, the time required to initiate migration after the onset of the hazard heavily affected well-being. If people desired but were unable to move, they were forced to remain in unsafe zones where they suffered further OWB losses, while the realization that desired movement was unattainable also reduced their SWB. For most farmers who succeeded in moving, the early phase of settlement was challenging due to prior loss and damage, the costly transitions to new sites, and the need to build a new life. The start was most difficult when structural conditions such as governance or tenure systems were unfavorable. Although most migrants underwent an initial OWB decline after moving, their paths diverged over time. Nearly all migrants’ OWB improved relative to their levels at the taxing start of the process, but the extent of improvement varied. Short-term gains were related to finding ad-hoc solutions to the numerous new demands faced after moving and reaping the initial rewards of hard work and sacrifice. Longer-term improvements, however, required either resources with transformative potential, such as investments in education and the fruits of improving social networks, or beneficial events, such as the receipt of external assistance or the granting of land titles. Conversely, a longer duration of stay threatened to reproduce or exacerbate vulnerabilities, especially for the many people who were subjected to adverse structural conditions and had limited baseline resources. Finally, while (im)mobilities caused a persistent shift in some people’s SWB, several others achieved partial hedonic adaptation to their new situations over time. Such cognitive and emotional adaptation was even observed for several forced migrants who had an expectedly high resistance to moving.

In summary, the well-being impacts in the three cases analyzed can be grouped together in three characteristic temporal trajectories across seven phases of (im)mobilities (Figure 8.4).Footnote 1 The first path led survival migrants on the Costa and trapped people in the Sierra into a tailspin into severe ill-being with almost no possibility of improvement. The second path created a deadlock in a worsening state of life for most migrants from the Sierra and the trapped people in the Selva, while the voluntary stayers in the Sierra risked ending up on this path as well. Finally, a few of the Sierra migrants and Selva relocatees reached incremental fragile advances in well-being. Because of these improvements, the direction of future change was less predetermined for this third pathway than for the other two.

Figure 8.4
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Three characteristic well-being trajectories of climate (im)mobilities over time. (Note: Created by the author)

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2 Conditions and Mechanisms Shaping Well-being

This study aimed not only to identify the well-being effects of climate (im)mobilities but also to explain what contributed to, enabled, or produced them. Viewed comparatively, the Peruvian case studies highlight the importance of three major aspects that shape well-being across the lifecycles of (im)mobilities, as visualized in Figure 8.5. The most dominant influence was (a) the (un)favorability of structural conditions, followed by (b) the nature and impacts of hazards. Finally, there were (c) moderating effects of people’s level of agency, namely their migratory aspirations and capabilities as well as the additional resources required to settle or stay. Below, I discuss how these three elements were configured in the case studies and the ways in which they influenced the results. (As noted above, there were also feedback effects between the different axes of well-being, with a stronger effect of objective on subjective dimensions than vice versa; these effects are not discussed again).

Figure 8.5
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Major influences on well-being changes. (Note: Created by the author)

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2.1 Structural Conditions

First and foremost, the boundaries of migrants’ and stayers’ actions and well-being paths were strongly determined by manifest structural conditions at varying levels, such as institutions, policies, customs, norms, networks, and social stratification, as well as people’s socialization into these structures. The analysis below highlights that structural constraints considerably outweighed structural opportunities in most cases, which frequently promoted ill-being (Figure 8.6).

Figure 8.6
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Structural constraints and limited opportunities strongly influence well-being paths. (Note: Created by the author)

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In all cases, various structural constraints significantly reduced people’s opportunities to be well. The studied agricultural communities were structurally disadvantaged in three ways: they were heavily exposed to climate hazards due to global emissions, while local rural-urban development divides and weak governance reduced their ability to manage these climate threats in ways that would preserve well-being. To begin with, the affected people were systematically disadvantaged because they had to cope with climate hazards emerging from global emissions to which they had made a negligible contribution. Furthermore, as undiversified subsistence farmers, they operated with minimal margins and had seriously limited capacity to cope with the increasing climate impacts. In Peru, 80% of farmers depend on informal subsistence livelihoods, and many of these farmers are vulnerable to food insecurity and income shocks (CEPLAN 2016; WFP & CENEPRED 2015; World Bank 2019). In 2014, people in rural areas in Peru were three times more likely to live below the national poverty line than urban residents, and their poverty was more profound (World Bank 2019, 2021c). In addition, since most farmers lived in remote areas in a centralized state that did not prioritize rural areas, they tended to be disenfranchised and subjected to weak governance. As a result, a lack of administrative resources, the absence of rule of law, and insufficient quality and continuity of state assistance further hindered effective local climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction and management (DRR/DRM). Spatial insularity also constrained people’s prospects for well-being in other ways; for example, poor mobile reception and transportation options reduced the ability of the trapped people in the Sierra to maintain contact with migrated peers. These structural deficits in development, climate adaptation and DRR/DRM, and governance heightened the risk of entrapment or movement under distress or survival conditions, which typically reduced well-being. For example, inhabitants of the poor rainforest villages had few options but to request relocation as they lacked the resources needed to adapt in place and the government did not invest in local DRR/DRM. Later, weak governance and bureaucratic failures left them trapped in risk zones for years, which further worsened their well-being. Already marginalized people had few chances to escape such disenfranchisement; when they migrated, state neglect was mostly reproduced and occasionally reinforced across space, regardless of whether farmers moved to nearby uninhabited zones or faraway settlements. For example, weak governance and a lack of administrative resources constrained the development opportunities and climate adaptation options for the farmers in the Sierra village who were deprived of glacial meltwater, and similar structural factors continued to limit their room to maneuver after they were forced to migrate to Lima and Huancayo. In the cities, weak urban governance and state neglect curbed these migrants’ ability to access adequate public services and other requisites for well-being.Footnote 2 Furthermore, structural ripple effects of rapid, irregular urban expansion and population growth worsened migrants’ opportunities for well-being as they struggled with oversaturated housing markets alongside largely unregulated and informal but highly competitive job markets.Footnote 3 In addition, rising costs of living threatened to nullify the possible income gains migrants stood to make following their move. Moreover, increasing land scarcity and tenure insecurity challenged the well-being of the urban migrants, who were increasingly forced to settle in irregular, peripheral city zones marked by limited state presence and adverse living conditions. Similar land and tenure issues also reduced people’s well-being in the Selva and Costa cases, where non-state actors further aggravated these factors, for example by increasing land prices or contributing to land conflicts.

Finally, certain individuals and groups faced disproportionately high structural constraints due to systematic marginalization related to intersecting social factors. Across all cases, women, minors, older adults, people with health limitations, and Indígenas tended to be at higher risk than others of a well-being decline when migrating or staying. For example, while most migrants suffered from government neglect, pregnant women, young children, and older adults were affected particularly hard by state failure to facilitate access to social programs and basic services.Footnote 4 Such systematic marginalization due to social factors was widespread: displaced children on the Costa and trapped children in the Selva were disproportionately harmed by restricted health and educational services; older, often-sick, and primarily female adults with limited migration capabilities who ended up trapped in the Sierra village with complete glacier loss struggled to make a living without appropriate state support in the increasingly uninhabitable area; pregnant women in both the prolonged displacement on the Costa and the fragmented, drawn-out relocations in the Selva suffered disproportionately from health challenges due to the degraded health infrastructure and state failure to restore it; migrants from the Sierra with prior health burdens or disabilities faced difficult starting conditions and limited livelihood options in the cities due to inequitable labor market structures and insufficient public services; and, finally, a number of women on the Costa suffered from insecurity after their male partners had migrated, given the lack of security provision by the state. These findings support calls to use intersectional and gender lenses in climate migration studies in ways that also account for structural inequalities (Edwards & Wiseman 2011; Lama et al. 2021). At a minimum, sensitivity to the role of gender is needed: half of Peru’s population is female and disproportionately affected by structural disadvantages, such as illiteracy and tenure insecurity (Oliver-Smith 2014; UN 2021), and these factors also influence their migratory agency and opportunities for well-being.

In contrast to these significant structural constraints on well-being, structural opportunities had low to average importance. To start with, in all cases, freedom of movement was a fundamental source of support for people’s transitions across space; all aspiring migrants with sufficient resources could execute their decisions to move within Peru without facing legal or political limitations. In addition, social networks constituted both key structural opportunities and resources that benefitted well-being in all case studies. For example, strong social support systems helped affected people who were neglected by the state to mitigate their experienced loss and damage to some extent and enabled migrants to decrease the transition costs of their moves. Moreover, non-state actors such as NGOs and private businesses mitigated hardship in several cases but seldom did so entirely. For example, support from NGOs and international organizations after the 2017 Coastal El Niño partially mitigated losses and the negative impacts of the state’s insufficient humanitarian assistance. In addition, thriving sectoral job markets contributed structurally to well-being in a few cases. For example, the Selva relocatees gained better road access after moving and could thereby also profit from the general growth in labor demand at the time. While businesses’ self-interested demand for labor occasionally coincided with migrants’ need to make a living, working conditions were often exploitative, as seen in the Costa case.Finally, there were more marginal or case-specific effects of other structural opportunities, such as digitalization and technology diffusion, which helped the voluntary stayers in the Sierra to maintain contact with the migrants and thus contributed to their well-being.

In summary, a major reason that most migrants’ and stayers’ well-being outcomes tended to be net-negative was that structural constraints significantly limited their room to maneuver. Survival migration or immobility, occurring under high structural constraints and low opportunities, entailed the highest risk of ill-being, while most distress (im)mobilities under high constraints and low to average opportunities also reduced well-being. By contrast, some of the rarer cases of improvement migration under more favorable structural conditions resulted in fragile well-being advances.Footnote 5

2.2 Nature and Impacts of Hazards

While structural constraints were a dominant influence on people’s well-being trajectories, the nature and impacts of hazards also shaped the types and conditions of (im)mobilities that occurred, as well as the resultant well-being paths. Key factors were the speed of hazard onset as well as the severity, irrevocability, and possible accumulations of impacts, and, closely related, the extent to which people could anticipate the climate threats and deal with them. All the case studies validated that subsistence farmers who operated with minimal margins and depended on difficult-to-diversify, ecosystem-based livelihoods were highly vulnerable to cumulative impacts from severe gradual and abrupt hazards and had limited options for local coping or adaptation, which resulted in well-being threats.

First, abrupt hazards left little time for preparation and caused displacements which challenged well-being, but the extent of the resulting hardships depended on the severity of the hazards. To begin with, moderate annual floods caused temporary displacements in one Selva village and cumulative damage that inhabitants could mostly manage on-site with moderate well-being losses. Conversely, severe abrupt hazards, such as exceptional floods, forced acute survival migration of large groups in the Selva and Costa, and while the initial, short-distance movements saved lives, they had to be implemented rapidly and under unsafe and traumatizing conditions that considerably reduced well-being. On the Costa, people remained displaced for prolonged periods and fell into ill-being due to the experienced losses and the lack of recovery options. While safer from hazards, they heavily depended on self-help and dwindling humanitarian assistance. By contrast, most of the displaced persons in the Selva at first returned to their flood-exposed home areas due to place attachment or a shortage of better options; when they decided to leave but lacked the resources necessary to do so, they ended up trapped for years, waiting for relocation. Such entrapment in areas with recurrent abrupt hazards—which often interacted with gradual processes such as warming and rainfall changes—significantly harmed well-being in both the Sierra and Selva. Only those who eventually relocated to a safer area in the Selva years later slightly improved their well-being. This finding highlights the need for durable solutions to prolonged or protracted entrapment.

Second, early- or mid-stage gradual hazards, such as extensive glacier loss in water-scarce Sierra areas, slowly expanded anticipatory improvement migration at first, which had mixed to positive well-being effects. However, as climate impacts accumulated in later stages, there was a change in the resources and conditions required for moving as well as the resultant well-being effects, and the farmers who moved after the meltwater had been completely lost in V2 had on average worse well-being outcomes. The cases suggest that when gradual climate impacts threaten habitability, they can force acute migration under distress or survival conditions similar to that described above for grave abrupt hazards. In such cases, migratory feedback mechanisms can lead to gradual settlement abandonment, which also threatens the shrinking population’s well-being. While some farmers in the Sierra chose to stay and experienced mixed well-being effects (at least before climate impacts and emigration intensified), others whose migration resources eroded became trapped in deprivation.

To summarize, the hazards contributed to varied well-being paths. Nonetheless, parallels emerged between the well-being tracks taken after (a) low-intensity, abrupt impacts and early-stage, gradual impacts as well as between those taken after (b) severe, abrupt impacts and irrevocable, late-stage gradual impacts. The latter type of hazard made ill-being most likely because it caused greater and less repairable loss and damage, while the affected people had the weakest abilities to anticipate and deal with these hazards.

2.3 Agency

Finally, although well-being trajectories were primarily defined by structural constraints and the severity of climate impacts, the affected people’s limited agency also shaped these paths. Building on the framework presented in section 2.3, the analysis confirmed that people’s agency depended on (a) their migratory aspirations and capabilities to move and (b) the additional resources required to settle or stay, which were partially influenced by intersecting social factors such as age and sex.

To begin with, migratory aspirations shaped well-being paths. Being forcedFootnote 6 to move tended to reduce well-being most severely, because migrants’ unrealizable desire to stay in their homes lowered their readiness to invest in their new lives after moving (Sierra V2 and Costa). Conversely, voluntary (and, in the best case, anticipatory) migrants usually nurtured aspirations that supported their new starts (Sierra V1, Selva V3). They were eager to profit from the longed-for change and dealt with the initial struggles in the hope that future gains would reimburse them. Yet, such high migratory aspirations also made disappointment more likely, since not all expectations could be met, as seen for some Sierra migrants. Finally, people who stayed voluntarily typically fared better than those who aspired to leave but were unable to do so and ended up trapped, as noted below.

The second element influencing well-being outcomes was migratory capabilities. Most migrants lacked sufficient resources to be able to move in safety and dignity. For example, several displaced persons in the coastal zone lost close to all their resources in floods; they had to flee rapidly for survival under highly adverse conditions and ended up in a barren desert strip. The additional trauma, insecurity, and losses experienced during these journeys reinforced their later pathways toward ill-being. Conversely, the few people in the case studies with more capabilities were usually able to move earlier and more safely. For example, in the Selva, people with savings were the first to relocate to sheltered land and thereby reduced their hazard exposure and improved their well-being. Finally, if people’s capabilities were too low to enact an existing desire to leave, their well-being usually declined severely because they were forcibly trapped in situations they wanted or needed to escape.

People required not only migratory capabilities but also further resources to fulfill their needs, pursue their goals, and address demands where they settled or stayed (Ryan et al. 2008). Within the structural constraints that severely limited people’s actions, the amount of resources that they possessed created further path dependencies for well-being impacts. For changes in the well-being dimension development from a secure base, key resources included the availability of buffers and resources to cope with shocks, the state of livelihood diversification and recoverability, the transferability of prior skills and access to new skills, as well as health and education baselines. Next, whether people obtained a space to live better depended strongly on the socioeconomic resources they had available to pursue reconstruction after disaster displacement or to settle in secure, legal city zones after migration. Further, people’s social relatedness paths were contingent on their baseline embeddedness in their home communities as well as on the number and quality of social entry points or networks in their destination. Finally, personal coping mechanisms and people’s tendency toward optimism or pessimism shaped SWB trajectories significantly. Overall, people who had low baseline resources that could not easily be transformed to match their new situations and who struggled to acquire new resources often faced roadblocks, predetermined breaking points, and downward spirals of ill-being. For example, after their villages had been destroyed by floods, migrants on the Costa were forced to settle in makeshift camps with extremely low baseline resources. Many spiraled into ill-being because prior losses of livelihoods, assets, infrastructure, and health constituted large burdens for their attempts to rebuild their lives. As another example, most Sierra migrants remained deadlocked in a worsening state of life in the cities because they lacked the educational profiles required to obtain decent jobs and lived in slums. Simultaneously, their baseline poverty hindered their ability to make investments that could have compensated for these disadvantages, such as moving to more secure zones with adequate basic services. In Ryan and colleagues’ (2008) terms, migrants who lacked sufficient baseline resources struggled to cope with aversive demands (adverse external events and experiences) while facing frequent demand overload or demand strains (insufficient resources to satisfy needs or goals or the availability of finite resources to address competing priorities). Conversely, more baseline resources—especially those with transformational potential, such as transferable skills—usually resulted in more room to maneuver and greater well-being. These resources enabled people to deal better with aversive demands, to experience less demand overload or strains (Ryan et al. 2008), and to create or take advantage of opportunities.Footnote 7 For example, a small number of Sierra migrants possessed or acquired the resources needed to start studying, which allowed them to gain the skills required to obtain better jobs (although in often arduous processes); these skills, in turn, increased other aspects of their well-being. At the individual level, resources conducive to well-being in all cases included good health, the ability to study and work, sacrifice, self-help, innovation, entrepreneurship, social skills, and personal coping mechanisms. Resources at the community level accrued from the capacity to self-organize, act, and resist marginalization. For example, dense social networks, mutual support mechanisms, communal task systems, self-organized reconstruction measures compensating for state deficits, as well as joint struggles for change contributed to positive impacts on every well-being component studied here. The case of the Selva village demonstrates that persistent community action can, in certain cases, mitigate some of the worst well-being risks associated with climate (im)mobilities. Ultimately, people’s resources were partially determined by intersecting social factors. Some of these intersecting factors, such as health burdens, reduced people’s resources and thereby increased their susceptibility to aversive demands such as worsening health infrastructure, whereas migrants or stayers with better health were either not affected by or better equipped to deal with such demands. Simultaneously, certain socially ascribed factors created well-being challenges or opportunities because they resulted in systemic marginalization or privileges. This is where the individual level connects with structure, as discussed in the section above on structure. For example, because the systematically disadvantaged Indigenous people in the rainforest had limited access to education and social services, their resources to cope with the floods were limited.

3 Summary and Overarching Propositions

In summary, the comparison of the case studies reveals that significant structural constraints set hard limits on people’s well-being pathways. Foremost, weak governance as well as development and climate inequalities, together with other structures of neglect and marginalization, created an uneven distribution of opportunities to migrate in the first place, to move or stay under tolerable conditions, and to subsequently preserve or enhance well-being. For migrants moving to formerly uninhabited spaces and stayers, structural factors and the respective social systems did not change fundamentally, which is why inequalities tended to be reproduced or reinforced. Although migrants from the Sierra settled in different urban settings, moving also typically reproduced or exacerbated and only partly modified strong structural constraints; in some cases, old constraints (such as spatial insularity) were replaced with new ones (such as tenure insecurity). Therefore, structural constraints constituted a dominant determinant of people’s well-being and the reason that most stayers and migrants experienced deprivations. Simultaneously, people’s well-being trajectories also depended on the varying nature and impacts of hazards, which shaped their baseline resources to different extents. Severe abrupt or late-stage gradual climate impacts created particularly heavy well-being burdens for subsequent (im)mobilities. Moreover, the analysis demonstrated that most farmers had very limited agency to address climate impacts or circumvent state failures and other structural hurdles, which further lowered their chances of maintaining or enhancing their well-being. Few affected people managed to use their limited agency to achieve small advances within their constrained room to maneuver. Figure 8.7 synthesizes these findings of the comparative analysis. By plotting the three key influences on well-being identified here, it displays that strong structural constraints, severe hazards, and limited agency led to net well-being declines or stagnation for most analyzed groups.

Figure 8.7
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Well-being impacts in function of structure, hazards, and agency. (Note: Created by the author)

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Lastly, the comparative analysis of varied forms of climate (im)mobilities in Peru makes it possible to induce propositions that are transferable to certain settings beyond these specific cases. In particular, the propositions may be applicable to subsistence farmers and other people with marginal access to socioeconomic, spatial, and political resources, who live in climate impact hotspots that are characterized by both weak governance and adverse social structures, as is discussed in more detail in the conclusions in chapter 9. The nine propositions below respond to the main questions that guided this research, namely, in what ways and why migrating from or staying in areas harmed by climate hazards affects people’s well-being.

  1. (1)

    People’s well-being trajectories during climate (im)mobilities are highly contingent on the favorability of structural conditions as well as on the nature and impacts of hazards, while people’s levels of agency can moderate well-being effects to a limited extent.

  2. (2)

    The more damaging or less repairable the climate impacts, the higher the risk of harmful conditions during related climate migration or immobility and of ensuing well-being losses. Well-being risks are particularly high after severe abrupt hazards, late-stage gradual hazards, and cumulative shocks.

  3. (3)

    The more unfavorable the structural conditions under which staying or climate migration and settling occur, the more damaging the impacts on people’s well-being. Well-being is especially threatened where development gaps, constrained livelihood options, weak governance, marginalization, and land issues combine.

  4. (4)

    Because most marginalized climate migrants and stayers lack the opportunity to influence larger societal structures, prior marginalization and inequalities are likely to be reproduced or exacerbated in most cases if third actors do not intervene substantially.

  5. (5)

    For most poor, undiversified subsistence farmers living in societies with weak governance and deep inequalities, climate migration likely entails well-being losses early on, which hinders the farmers’ subsequent well-being trajectories. The majority may experience net-negative outcomes.

  6. (6)

    The more people are forced to move or stay against their aspirations, and the fewer their capabilities for migration, the higher the risk of adverse well-being effects. Poverty, a lack of social networks, and the often unplanned, precarious circumstances of forced (im)mobility constitute key risks for well-being losses.

  7. (7)

    The fewer people’s further resources are for either settling after migration or staying at their original sites, the more likely are deepening vulnerabilities during (im)mobilities. In particular, the lack of financial, social, and human capital that can be flexibly applied in changing surroundings increases vulnerabilities.

  8. (8)

    The more intersecting social factors, such as age, ethnicity, health status, and sex, make affected people susceptible to aversive demands or lead to structural marginalization, the more likely well-being losses during climate (im)mobilities.

  9. (9)

    Regardless of whether subsistence farmers migrate or stay after climate impacts, the impacts on development from a secure base and a space to live better—which include livelihoods, health, education, and decent living conditions—tend to influence one another strongly. By contrast, the impacts on social relatedness can partially differ. Jointly, these OWB elements have a stronger feedback effect on SWB than vice versa.

These propositions are based on a systematic comparison of observations made in the case study chapters 5–7 and the identified patterns of similarities and differences. While the propositions are specified in the theoretical domain, future research could transform them into falsifiable hypotheses in order to test them in the empirical domain (Bhattacherjee 2022); doing so is beyond the scope of this dissertation. To this end, the concepts from the mostly qualitative findings would need to be operationalized and translated into corresponding quantitative variables. Subsequently, the hypotheses built on these variables could be tested with observed data and either supported or rejected (Morgan 2015). Such future research would be welcome to expand the still limited knowledge on the well-being impacts of climate (im)mobilities and enable the construction of better theories regarding the impacts of migration and staying in general.