American Studies professor Maria Cristina Garcia’s research on immigration, refugees and asylum seekers is something that’s always been personal to her, having left Cuba for the USA with her family in the 1960s. “The experience of coming as part of a refugee migration sensitized me to the experience of other refugees,” she said. Her research into the unequal impact of climate change on vulnerable populations is something Garcia hopes will help guide future policy. Governments tend to pigeonhole refugees and asylum seekers into discrete categories, but migration has always been multicausal, Garcia argues, with people often originally displaced by the environmental drivers her research aims to highlight. She believes we should not only focus on ways to mitigate climate change, but also on ways to help populations become resilient to its impacts. Societies of the future will need to share the burden of accommodating displaced people — and not lose faith. “Hope is a discipline,” Garcia said. “It’s very easy to despair, so you have to make a conscious choice to look for reasons to hope.”