ABSTRACT

The idea of a ‘climate change refugee’ is a comparatively new one. Despite the fact that international migration in response to environmental factors has been both normal and common throughout human history, the first significant discussions of movement based primarily on climate change-related factors1

started only in the 1990’s, and at this time, the discussion was mostly undertaken by scientists interested in climate change, not by those doing legal, practical, or normative work on refugees and forced migration2 (McAdam 2012, pp. 1-3). The highly comprehensive three-volume set, Immigration and Asylum from 1900 to the Present (Gibney and Hansen, 2005) does not discuss climate change specifically at all, nor does it have entries for island states such as Tuvalu or Kiribati, often thought to be among the most likely to produce climate change refugees.3 A recent volume on forced migration, (Crepeau et al., 2006) covering many different problems and perspectives, included no coverage of climate change. While a large legal and practical (or, perhaps, intended to be practical) literature has developed over the last several years,4 more normatively focused work has been relatively sparse. Two of the most important recent

normative works on refugees and asylum, Gibney (2005) and Price (2009), for example, give no significant discussion to the topic of climate change at all.5

While in the last few years, there have been a small number of philosophical papers addressing, at least in some sense, the problem of climate change refugees, (Risse 2009, Nine 2010, Kolers 2012) I shall register some significant worries about the treatment of the problem presented there.