Dr. Yvonne Su is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research sits at the intersection of global environmental politics, migration, and security, with a focus on climate migration, disaster governance, and the politics of climate security. Her research examines how climate change and displacement reshape power, security, and governance across borders, drawing on empirically grounded research in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Canada, and the Arctic. Her research programme engages core debates about order, hierarchy, and the management of conflict and cooperation in a warming world, showing how climate change and mobility are reconfiguring regional and global governance. Dr. Su currently holds appointments as a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and an Associate Professor at York University.

Over the past five years, Dr. Su has secured over $12 million in external research funding. Currently, she is part of three multi-million-dollar grants researching climate adaptation and resilience in Ghana, the Philippines, India, Canada and the Arctic. These transdisciplinary projects combine climate models, remote sensing, community mapping, ethnography, participatory GIS and digital storytelling to analyse how environmental disruptions generate new forms of vulnerability, displacement, and governance challenges. She has over 40 academic publications (1 book, 32 refereed journal articles, 9 book chapters) and 84 other publications, contributing to debates in political ecology, human security, disaster response, and the securitization of the environment.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Dr. Su has spent more than a decade examining the socio-ecological impacts of climate change and disasters, focusing on how social inequalities shape communities’ adaptive capacities, exposure to risk, and post-disaster mobility. Her most recent work examines the intentional “unintended consequences” of climate adaptation projects such as seawalls and resettlement schemes, and the future implications of climate visa lottery schemes in the Pacific. Her work on Indigenous knowledge systems and disaster risk reduction - cited by the IPCC - demonstrated how local knowledge can enhance just and effective climate adaptation and inform disaster governance frameworks. As an expert on climate migration, she has contributed to the UNHCR’s Global Recommendations on Nationality and Statelessness in the Context of Climate Change. Dr. Su is also regularly invited to provide commentary on public debates on climate and human security through outlets such as Foreign Policy, The Globe and Mail and The Conversation.

In Latin America, Dr. Su investigates how environmental, economic, and political crises in unstable border regions shape mobility, insecurity, and governance. Focusing on border cities such as Pacaraima, Boa Vista, Manaus in Brazil and Cúcuta in Colombia, her work shows how climate-linked disruptions, resource scarcity, and collapsing social protections interact with restrictive borders and security regimes to produce new forms of vulnerability for displaced populations. She coined the term “intersecting precarity” to capture the combination of homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and gender-based violence that marginalized groups such as Venezuelan LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees experience. She is currently leading a multi-year SSHRC Partnership Development Grant on Bogotá’s LGBTQ+ Houses, examining how community-based infrastructures build everyday security, care, and resilience in contexts of displacement and urban crisis. Dr. Su also provides expert testimony in refugee determination hearings for LGBTQ+ Venezuelan asylum seekers, translating empirical findings into concrete impacts on protection regimes and human security frameworks. To date, she has helped four of them obtain refugee status in the United States.

As an interdisciplinary migration expert with lived experiences of migration, Dr. Su is committed to critically engaged research that examines contemporary transboundary challenges - such as climate displacement, disaster response, and the securitization of borders - through a Global South lens. Her work centres marginalised communities and advances the decolonization of research and knowledge production.