PHOENIX (Human Mobility, Global Challenges and Resilience in an Age of Social Stress) is a Belmont Forum funded project that aims to examine how Global Changes - including environmental and climate changes, demographic changes, changing consumption patterns, energy and land-use, developments in the politics of food and mental health, and socio-cultural transformations - impact mobility.
This project aims to model social tipping points by utilizing techniques from geographic information systems (GIS) and synthesizing existing geographical, earth science and longitudinal datasets. The project applies a governance of crisis approach to understand how diverse policy areas ranging from sustainable development and disaster risk reduction to health, food, and climate change might be bridged with larger policy frameworks to understand and predict mobility patterns. The project conducts two human-centric case studies of social tipping points:
- food security and belonging, and
- cultural survival and resilience.
These case studies provide new ways of looking at how climate (im-)mobilities and their social tipping points are shaped by socio-cultural contexts and the psycho-social health of populations. Drawing on natural sciences like climate and sustainability studies and on the social sciences of political science, sociology, psychology, economics and anthropology, the project adds to the interdisciplinary diagnostic and prognostic toolbox of Global Change and mobility as well as vulnerability and resilience assessments. This research project utilizes a wide evidence base - from Europe and the Middle East to Africa and South America - to ensure maximum comparative and global impact of its findings. This research project examines the societal and environmental aspects of Global Change and (im-)mobilities to help leaders and the most vulnerable members of societies to understand, adapt and thrive.
IIASA contribution
IIASA, via the Advancing Systems Analysis Program’s Systemic Risk and Resilience group (ASA-SYRR), contributes to the PHOENIX project to examine the correspondences between the various disciplines studying mobility, Global Change and resilience brought together during the course of the project. This entails synthesizing the project results regarding climate mobilities and risks, politics of food and mental health, and socio-cultural transformations and to add to the interdisciplinary diagnostic and prognostic toolbox of Global Change and mobility, vulnerability and resilience assessment. This includes the modelling of social tipping points (STPs) and to map the puzzles to which resilience, coping, justice and resistance is presented as a solution when confronting Global Change.