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Introduction: The Geography of an Inevitable Crisis
Climate change is frequently distilled into sterile data points—graphs tracking carbon ppm, charts projecting sea-level rise in centimeters, and economic models assessing global loss. But behind these statistics lies a profound human reality: how people live, adapt, move, stay, remember, and imagine their futures.
Published by the UN Global Centre for Climate Mobility (GCCM), the creative arts anthology Confronting Climate (Im)Mobilities, edited by Rol-J Williams, shatters the cold distance of policy reports. Comprising 54 works of visual art, music lyrics, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, the collection centers the voices of young artists aged 18 to 35 from the Greater Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific.
Launched through a call for submissions that garnered 315 entries, this anthology maps a world where environmental breakdown is no longer a distant theoretical threat, but an intimate, daily disruption.
1. The Prelude: Voices from the Frontlines
The anthology opens with foundational pieces by GCCM Climate Mobility Fellows, establishing the emotional and political stakes of the collection.
In his poem "Displaced, Never Again," editor-in-chief Rol-J Williams confronts the profound injustice of small island vulnerability:
To be but a speck / or a collection of specks / in this 21st century oven, / facing the torment of volatility, / we are losing a battle we can barely fight / and a battle we did not start.
Similarly, Deshawn Browne’s poem "Antigua and Barbuda: Paradise and Persistence" captures the violent rupture of hurricanes like Irma and Beryl on island paradises, where "paradise lost is hard to find", transforming vibrant communities into cautionary tales for humankind.
2. Visual Arts: Materiality, Thirst, and Displacement
The visual arts section translates the visceral weight of ecological collapse into tangible imagery, utilizing textiles, photography, and mixed media to critique global inequalities.
Global Waste and the Global South: Gandor Collins's category-winning mixed-media piece, "Fig Aesthetics" (Ghana), uses textile waste and industrial leather remnants to explore how overproduction and global waste circulation disproportionately burden the Global South.
The Burden of Scarcity: In "There Will Be No Clean Water" (Eswatini), Sinenkosi Msomi depicts a young man carrying both polluted and scarce clean water, illustrating how environmental degradation turns a fundamental human right into an exhausting physical obstacle.
Sequential Critique: Dylan Miles’s "Coin Roller and Big Monster" (The Bahamas) uses sequential art inspired by Hurricane Dorian to critique economic systems that prioritize material wealth over human survival during a climate disaster.
3. Music and Lyrics: Rhythms of Resistance and Solidarity
Bridging auditory culture with political critique, the music section sounds the alarm on ecological neglect while demanding regional and global solidarity.
The Right to Remain: Category winner K-Jel Smithen (Saint Kitts and Nevis) delivers "The Right to Remain," a track examining how environmental stress and economic instability dictate who can move, who must move, and who is left behind without options.
Agroecology and Justice: Alfred Gabriel Flomo (Liberia) calls for systemic change in "Climate Justice," urging audiences to abandon fossil fuels, support agroecology, and protect land rights for youth and women who bear the brunt of environmental failure.
A Continental Cry: In "Allô la Terre" (Central African Republic), Andjiodeo Grâce weaves French and English verses into a planetary plea, voicing the interconnected suffering of Bangladesh, Haiti, Somalia, and the CAR: "Moi votre seul abri, votre Maison, votre vie... Learn to live with me and not against me."
4. Creative Writing: Fiction and Non-Fiction of the Im (Mobile)
Perhaps the most haunting dimensions of the anthology live in its prose and poetry, where writers explore the psychological weight of staying versus leaving.
The Slow Creep and Sudden Shocks
In the creative non-fiction piece "We Left Before We Had the Language" (Ghana), Habiba Iddrisu Jingunaah reflects on how rural communities endured failing harvests for generations through sheer patience and prayer, lacking the modern vocabulary of climate change until daughters began migrating south simply to survive.
This theme of trapped mobility echoes in Eleberi Charles Oghenekaro’s "When Water Paused Time" (Nigeria), which chronicles the devastating 2012 Bayelsa floods. Oghenekaro explores the eerie duality of water—how it raises a community, yet can just as easily trap a student in limbo, cutting off university admissions and trapping families under suspended timelines.
The Politics of Inability
In "When the Water Stays: Climate (Im)mobilities in the Niger Delta," Ewuola Philip Oluwatobi dissects the intersection of climate shocks and industrial oil extraction. Oluwatobi points out a fundamental injustice:
This is climate injustice in layered form: those least responsible for global warming absorb disproportionate harm — while living atop the resource that powered much of that warming.
When elderly residents ask, "Move to where?", it is not mere stubbornness; it is an articulation of profound constraint. Relocation without support is abandonment; mobility without resources is impossible.
Conclusion: A Call to Policy Action
Confronting Climate (Im)Mobilities succeeds because it refuses to treat human beings as collateral damage or numerical projections. Edited by Rol-J Williams and championed by leaders like Prof. Kamal Amakrane, this anthology demonstrates that true climate resilience cannot be built through physical infrastructure alone. It must be carried through stories, art, heritage, and collective memory.
As these young voices from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific make clear, the future of climate mobility demands that policymakers sit down on threadbare mats, listen to frontline truths, and build a world where staying is secure, leaving is a choice, and dignity is preserved for all.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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