Blog Post: Should Natural Disaster Victims Be Offered Safe Haven and Opportunity Abroad?

(Center for Global Development) October 27, 2010 – Last week, I hosted a roundtable here at CGD to discuss how the United States and other rich countries might better provide safe haven and opportunity to potential migrants from developing countries that are in acute need—particularly the victims of natural disasters. This question has been at the […]

Paper: Ecological Refugees, States Borders, and the Lockean Proviso

Cara Nine of the University College Cork recently submitted the paper “Ecological Refugees, State Borders, and the Lockean Proviso” to the Journal of Applied Philosophy. In this essay she expounds on the term “ecological refugee,” which we might better understand as environmental or climate-induced migrant. She analyzes the question: what may the people of an […]

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 […]

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 […]

Towards a Soft Law Protection for "Distress Migrants"

“A complex range of often inter-related factors – including the environment and nature, conflict, and the international political economy – contribute to creating the imperatives and incentives for people to leave their countries and cross international borders”, writes Alexander Betts in *. All of these push factors, he argues, might not necessarily guarantee protective status […]