Climate Displacement

Abstract The impacts of climate change are reshaping patterns of displacement around the world. Extreme weather events destroy homes, environmental degradation undercuts the viability of livelihoods, sea-level rise and coastal erosion force communities to relocate, and risks to food and resource security magnify the sources of political instability. Climate displacement—the displacement of people driven at least in part by the impacts of climate change—is a pressing moral challenge that is incumbent upon us to address. This book develops a political theory of climate displacement. Most existing work on climate displacement has tended to take an idealized ‘climate refugee’ as its object of analysis. But this approach does not take seriously the complexity and heterogeneity of climate displacement. This book instead takes the empirical dynamics of climate displacement as its starting point. It examines the problems raised by the interaction of climate change and displacement in five practical contexts: community relocation, territorial sovereignty, labour migration, refugee movement, and internal displacement. In each context, climate change raises distinct problems and questions, which this book explores on their own terms. At the same time, this book treats climate displacement as a unified phenomenon by examining the overarching questions of responsibility and fairness that it raises. The result is an empirically grounded political theory of climate displacement that both maps the conceptual terrain of climate displacement and charts a course for meeting the moral challenge that climate displacement raises.