Search

Climate change is profoundly modifying the earth's environment, making certain territories uninhabitable. Faced with this known phenomenon, this article outlines a research approach for assessing the law's role in encouraging states to preemptively protect individuals who live in deteriorating territories, notably by enabling mobility. The question is, however, far from simple, insofar as most of the ways to adapt to climate change--and particularly mobility, which has important human and social implications--require profound societal choices that anthropology has the tools to study. I therefore accompany my legal research with an anthropological approach centered around ethnography conducted at three sites--France, Guadeloupe, Senegal--where state-sponsored mobility is either being considered or already being used as an option to confront the progressive disappearance of land that is being swept away by the sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pace of tree microevolution during Anthropocene warming is largely unknown. We used a retrospective approach to monitor genomic changes in oak trees since the Little Ice Age (LIA). Allelic frequency changes were assessed from whole‐genome pooled sequences for four age‐structured cohorts of sessile oak (Quercus petraea) dating back to 1680, in each of three different oak forests in France. The genetic covariances of allelic frequency changes increased between successive time periods, highlighting genome‐wide effects of linked selection. We found imprints of parallel linked selection in the three forests during the late LIA, and a shift of selection during more recent time periods of the Anthropocene. The changes in allelic covariances within and between forests mirrored the documented changes in the occurrence of extreme events (droughts and frosts) over the last 300 years. The genomic regions with the highest covariances were enriched in genes involved in plant responses to pathogens and abiotic stresses (temperature and drought). These responses are consistent with the reported sequence of frost (or drought) and disease damage ultimately leading to the oak dieback after extreme events. They provide support for adaptive evolution of long‐lived species during recent climatic changes. Although we acknowledge that other sources (e.g., gene flow, generation overlap) may have contributed to temporal covariances of allelic frequency changes, the consistent and correlated response across the three forests lends support to the existence of a systematic driving force such as natural selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]