Researcher Summary
Dr. Dalila Gharbaoui is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury under the NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs funded Pacific Ocean and Climate Crisis Assessment. She holds a PHD in Political and Social Sciences from University of Liege (Hugo Observatory on Environmental Migration) and a PHD in Pacific studies from University of Canterbury gained with the support of the Marsden Fund Te Pūtea Rangahau a Marsden. Dalila’s PhD thesis focused on climate-related (im)mobility and land governance in the Pacific region.
In her enquiry, Dalila has observed planned relocation and the consequences of these on land and indigenous governance mechanisms. Field study in the Pacific revealed that people affected by climate change are forced to move but also sometimes forced to stay in locations exposed to extreme environmental hazards or gradual erosion such as sea level rise. These populations "trapped" are often the most vulnerable. At the same time, voluntary immobility is also an emerging category that often reveals resilience mechanisms that have been developed over time or retrieved from the past to address environmental challenges in the region. Those two observations led Dalila to explore in her future research how to frame a two-sided conceptual space exploring both vulnerability and resilience of communities in the context of climate (im)mobility.
Dalila is an author to several research relevant climate adaptation, (im)mobility in the Pacific region, Africa, and Europe. She has participated to various international, national and regional discussions on human mobility and climate change, providing expertise on planned relocation including at the UNFCCC. In the past, Dalila worked as researcher for UNHCR, IOM, UNCCD, UNU-CRIS and Amnesty International.
