‘Monsoon mobilities’: moving beyond the binary of migration and ‘trapped populations’ in a vulnerable mountain community in Nepal

Accelerating glacier melt and increasing climatic extremes are transforming mountain environments, heightening exposure to hazards such as glacial lake outburst floods, debris flows, and landslides. In the Hindu Kush Himalaya, where communities often inhabit multi-hazard landscapes, these environmental changes intensify livelihood insecurities and challenge local adaptive capacities. This study focuses on human mobility and immobility in response to such climate risks, which have received increasing attention in the last decade, but are still often framed as a binary. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Nepal’s Bhote Koshi Valley, we show that this framing obscures more intricate and differentiated ways human im/mobility is shaped by high-risk environments. Instead, we demonstrate that im/mobilities are spatio-temporally differentiated, deeply entangled and unequally distributed across social groups. A key finding of this study is the phenomenon of ‘monsoon mobilities’: a circular, annual and short- to medium-distance movement of people in anticipation of monsoon-induced risks. These mobilities take place in a context of fragile road infrastructure, where residents are at risk of temporary entrapment. At the same time, they depend on the movement of goods and people (e.g. trade and tourism) for their livelihoods, illustrating that monsoon mobilities function not only as an immediate safety response but also as a livelihood adaptation strategy– unequally accessible within the community. By showing how seasonal risks, fragile infrastructure, mobility-dependent livelihoods and social inequality co-produce differentiated mobility patterns, this study advances a nuanced understanding of climate-related im/mobility in mountain contexts, crucial to addressing specific mobility needs of risk-exposed communities.