Scholarly understanding of these topics has evolved rapidly over recent decades, yet there is still much we don’t know about the complex ways that climate change interacts with migration decisions. In this final chapter, we discuss a number of emerging issues and future research needs including: gendered dimensions of migration in the context of future climate change, how climate-related migration affects Indigenous populations and cultural heritage, the interplay between climate-related migration and human health, the impacts of climate-related migration on receiving communities, identification of critical thresholds in climate-migration connections, and unforeseeable climate-migration outcomes.

This chapter provides an overview of policymaking that is being done at international, regional, and national levels, highlighting some of the key processes and frameworks relevant to climate-related migration and displacement. We discuss the extent to which these policies respond adequately (or not) to the needs and complexity of the challenge. We also describe a range of actors that have been actively engaged in these policymaking processes and the nature of their influence on these processes. We assess the different levels of actors in descending order of scale, starting with an overview of international policy frameworks and processes and then moving through regional and national level processes and approaches. Although we assess each level separately, they should be viewed as a network or web of interconnected actors and processes that influence one another, even as they evolve.

In this chapter, the history and development of the concept of connectivity in geomorphology is presented. It further provides an overview of connectivity terminology, the underlying concepts and identifies the benefits of connectivity thinking for geomorphological research and applications. We further pursue the question of whether connectivity can be considered as key concept in geomorphology and address general key challenges in using connectivity to understand complex geomorphic systems.

Coastal rivers and deltas provide important ecosystem services, are hot spots of energy and food production and host hundreds of millions of people. These geomorphic features possess a wide range of spatial and temporal scales that need to be accounted for when analyzing the form of these systems. This form can be characterized by three types of connectivity: structural, functional, and process connectivity. Structural connectivity is driven by the physical adjacency of topographic elements; functional connectivity pertains to the transport processes that control the magnitude and directionality of fluxes of water, solutes, and solids across coastal landscapes, and process connectivity captures the variables and their interactions that define the system’s state. Connectivity and/or the lack thereof in coastal landscapes control the functioning of these systems; as such connectivity is a helpful framework that captures the structure, dynamics, and responses of coastal landscapes under future scenarios of climate and anthropogenic modifications so that these systems can be studied and restoration interventions optimally informed.

Coastal deltaic floodplains provide important ecosystem services such as trapping sediment, reducing storm surge, and processing riverine nutrients. These landscapes are at high risk due increasing rates of sea level rise, accelerated subsidence, extraction of resources from the subsurface, and extensive human interventions. Human interventions to preserve, sustain, or restore ecosystem services often aim at reversing disconnectivity that is responsible for degrading many coastal ecosystems as it prevents the natural distribution of water, solids, and solutes over the delta plain. Deltaic floodplains with tidal freshwater and estuarine wetlands can be defined by the elevation of the wetland platform that controls the frequency and duration of flooding (hydroperiod), an example of the feedback between structural (elevation) and functional (frequency and duration of flooding) connectivity elements and reflected in the resulting couplings among system’s variables (process connectivity). These processes are critical to maintaining the function of coastal deltaic floodplains in mitigating CO2 enrichment in atmosphere and reducing nutrient loading to coastal waters.

River and wetland case studies from contrasting landscape settings with differing sediment cascades and (dis)connectivity relationships in Australia and New Zealand present contrasting sediment ‘problems’. Here we use the concept of switches that regulate the operation of buffers, barriers and blankets as a basis to develop catchment-scale sediment management plans. We present plans for managing sediment (dis)connectivity for each case study. We conclude with five key factors that practitioners need to consider when embarking on managing sediment (dis)connectivity of rivers and wetlands in practice.

Glacial geomorphic processes can be mapped as a network of vertical and longitudinal connections between process domains in the glacier system, that can stretch from sources in continental interiors to sinks in the oceans, and through which ice, water and debris are transferred or stored. Domains can be defined structurally by their position within a flow system from areas of accumulation through to areas of ablation, but the functional or process-related connection of domains is better defined by geographic and temporal patterns in factors such as temperature that control glacier geomorphic processes. The idea of connectivity has long been important in glacier research, but without much explicit reference to connectivity science or terminology. Debris transport pathways, sediment stores, sediment budgets, and transfers of energy, water and debris through glaciers are fundamental to how glacial geomorphic systems work. There is a clear opportunity for glacial geomorphology to engage more with connectivity theory, as other areas of geomorphology have done, and for connectivity theory to be applied more explicitly to glacial environments.