Climate Migration: Critical Perspectives for Law, Policy, and Research

Carefully structured to navigate the reader through the issue of climate migration in a logical and rigorous manner, this book is the first to bring together key voices in order to examine systematically and critically why the problem exists, why its existence matters, and how lawyers, policy makers, and researchers might escape its long shadow.

At the heart of contemporary preoccupation with climate change is a concern for its societal impacts. Among these, its presumed effect on human migration has been perhaps the most politically resonant, regardless of whether that politics is oriented towards humanitarianism or national security. There is, however, a problem: climate migration remains a highly contested and ambiguous concept, with little consensus over what it means, what role it might serve if its meaning was known, or how either of these questions might ever be answered.

At a time in which both the effects of climate change, and the causes of migration, are of great public interest, and in which these interests are so often fraught with emotion and freighted with politics, the book brings dispassionately critical perspectives to an issue that desperately needs it.