Climate Displacement

In Climate Displacement, Assistant Professor in the Ethics Institute Jamie Draper draws together debates in different fields to provide a unified view on the topic of climate displacement: displacement of people driven at least in part by the impacts of climate change. 

Reshaping patterns

Climate change is reshaping patterns of displacement around the world. Extreme weather events destroy homes, environmental degradation threatens 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 is a pressing moral challenge that is incumbent upon us to address.

Five domains

This book develops a political theory of climate displacement. Most work on climate displacement has tended to take an idealised ‘climate refugee’ as its focus. But focusing on the figure of the climate refugee obscures the complexity and heterogeneity of climate displacement. Instead, this book takes the empirical dynamics of climate displacement as its starting point.

Climate Displacement examines the moral and political problems raised by the interaction of climate change and displacement in five domains: community relocation, territorial sovereignty, labour migration, refugee movement, and internal displacement. In each context, climate displacement raises distinct questions, which this book explores on their own terms.

Political theory

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 that both maps the conceptual terrain of climate displacement and charts a course for meeting the moral challenge that it raises.

If you order Climate Displacement online at Oxford University Press, you can save up to 30 per cent by using the promotion code ASFLYQ6.