Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law
ISBN: 9780191738494
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Law;

Displacement caused by climate change is an area of growing concern. With current rises in sea levels and changes to the global climate, it is an issue of fundamental importance to the future of many parts of the world.

This book critically examines whether States have obligations to protect people displaced by climate change under international refugee law, international human rights law, and the international law on statelessness. Drawing on field work undertaken in Bangladesh, India, and the Pacific island states of Kiribati and Tuvalu, it evaluates whether the phenomenon of 'climate change-induced displacement' is an empirically sound category for academic inquiry. It does so by examining the reasons why people move (or choose not to move); the extent to which climate change, as opposed to underlying socio-economic factors, provides a trigger for such movement; and whether traditional international responses, such as the conclusion of new treaties and the creation of new institutions, are appropriate solutions in this context.

In this way, the book queries whether flight from habitat destruction should be viewed as another facet of traditional international protection or as a new challenge requiring more creative legal and policy responses.


Jane McAdam, Scientia Professor of Law, University of New South Wales

Jane McAdam is Scientia Professor of Law and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the Director of the International Refugee and Migration Law project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law; a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC; and a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.

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