Much of the decades-old scholarly debate on environmental displacements has focused on legal categories or environmental aspects. By looking at how different types of weather and climate related phenomena (floods, cyclones and the rise of seawater) constrain social life in specific ways, the project contributes to the understanding of the entanglement of nature and society. We argue for a repoliticization of the debate on climate change, acknowledging that its impacts do not just have natural causes. We also develop the anthropological understandings of the notions of holism and sustainability to understand interrelated social changes. As Brightman and Lewis (2017) point out, the increasingly unpredictable effects of the climate change challenge the understanding of sustainability as being about remaining in ecological balance with nature or based on ensuring future predictability. We explore sustainability based on ethnographic data on human agency under the constraints of environmental challenges aiming to develop novel ways to understand sustainability as more than economic adaptation to environmental challenges.