News: If a Country Sinks Beneath the Sea, Is It Still a Country?

(ClimateWire) August 23, 2010 – Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors. Among them: If a country disappears, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its [...]

New Publication: Climate Change and Displacement

Jane McAdam has further added to the gap in climate change and migration literature with her newest opus Climate Change and Displacement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. As her book summary outlines: Environmental migration is not new. Nevertheless, the events and processes accompanying global climate change threaten to increase human movement both within States and across international borders. The [...]

Carteret Islands in the Movies Again: Sun Come Up

A new movie on climate change and migration arrived at the 14th annual DocuWeeks called Sun Come Up. You can watch the film between Friday, July 30 and Thursday, August 5 in New York City. Synopsis: Sun Come Up follows the relocation of some of the world’s first “environmental refugees,” the Carteret Islanders – a community [...]

Refusing ‘Refuge’ in the Pacific: (De)Constructing Climate-Induced Displacement in International Law

Jane McAdam, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia; and Research Associate, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, published a paper that calls for a new international treaty for ‘climate refugees’ or ‘climate migrants’. Drawing in part on field work undertaken in Kiribati and Tuvalu, it examines some conceptual and pragmatic difficulties [...]

Realist Reasoning for Climate Migrant Legitimacy

Original article by Kayly Ober In 2006, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao pledged $275 million in loans to Pacific nations – a decision, he said, that was “without any strings attached.” But China’s interest in the region extends to far more than being friendly with other developing countries. China knows that Pacific islands are increasingly important [...]

Blog Post: Pacific Islands Grow, Coral Reefs Die

(The Transatlantic Dialogue on Climate Change and Security) June 3, 2010 – Foreign Policy’s Passport blog has a quick post, “Pacific islands are actually growing” linking to a new study from the University of Auckland saying that 80% of Pacific Islands have grown or stayed the same size of the last 60 years.  The article [...]