Our weekly round up of new research on climate change, migration and displacement.

‘Climate Change Migrants’: Impediments to a Protection Framework and the Need to Incorporate Migration into Climate Change Adaptation Strategies
Lauren Nishimura

“Despite the reality of climate change, no international agreement or protection framework exists to plan for or address the expected dramatic increase in migration. Current international refugee, environmental, and human rights law does not account for climate change-induced displacement and migration, creating legal gaps in protection. This article explores why these gaps persist and seeks to understand the barriers to a protection framework for climate change migrants. If improved protection is to be achieved, then a typology and assessment of the obstacles such an effort faces is a necessary first step.”

Climate, Migration and Sex: The Biopolitics of Climate-Induced Migration
Julian Reid

Relations between climate and migration have received a lot of attention of late, in policy literatures concerned with problematizing it as a source of threat to the security and stability of international order, but also from authors concerned with interrogating its discursive constitution from more critical and less-conservative angles. This paper contributes to the development of latter approaches by problematizing the relations between migration and climate as a phenomenon of biopolitics, tightly connected to theories and discourses on and of population, poverty, and sexual reproduction. The paper demonstrates the contrasting ways in which climate-induced migration is dealt with, not just between poor and nonpoor, but human and animal species, especially in terms of the ways in which their reproductive capacities are differentially targeted for biopolitical intervention.

New research - climate and migration

Alex Randall coordinates the UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition. He is author several reports on migration and climate change. He writes regularly on migration, displacement and climate change for a number of outlets.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Get our weekly briefing. All the latest news, events and research. In your inbox, every week. 

You have successfully signed up

Share This