Climate change and human migration

Abstract

It is now widely recognized that climate change will reconfigure our physical and social landscapes in ways that we are just beginning to understand, and that it will directly and indirectly influence human migration patterns across geographic regions and the socio-economic spectrum. Exactly how climate change will affect migration, what climate-related migration will look like, and how scholars might go about studying it, however, remain points of contention. In this chapter, we identify some key threads in the burgeoning literature on climate change and human migration, including the influence of climate change on migration decisions and patterns, the challenges of empirically measuring and predicting the scale of climate migration, the likely patterns climate migration will take, and some of the looming governance and human rights questions posed by climate migration. Additionally, because both climate change and migration occur within a dynamic and highly unequal social, political, and economic landscape, we highlight some of the ways in which some communities are rendered more vulnerable than others in the face of both climate change and climate migration, as well as the ways in which such vulnerability is produced and perpetuated.