RESPONSES TO CLIMATE MIGRATION Katrina Miriam Wyman* In recent years there have been suggestions that climate change might generate 200 million or more migrants by 2050. In response to these suggestions, and concerns that existing law and policy will be inadequate to deal with the expected displacement, there recently have been several proposals for new legally binding multilateral instru- ments specifically addressing climate migration. This Article makes three contributions to the nascent literature on the legal and policy responses to migration induced by climate change. First, it identifies the two principal gaps in existing law and policy that underpin to a significant extent the recent proposals for a new binding multilateral instrument, describing these gaps as the “rights” gap and the “funding” gap. Second, this Article analyzes three of the leading proposals for a new binding mul- tilateral instrument. It identifies the ways that these proposals would respond to the rights and funding gaps and emphasizes the proposals’ limitations. Third, this Article emphasizes that addressing climate migration ultimately re- quires increasing the resilience of communities especially vulnerable to climate change. It then identifies ways to mitigate the effects of the rights and funding gaps by reducing existing vulnerabilities to climate change, without a new binding multilateral instru- ment. While a series of measures relying largely on existing legal and policy tools may seem less satisfying than proposals for a new binding multilateral instrument, these measures are more likely to address the concerns about human vulnerability to climate change that the proposals for new binding multilateral instruments have admirably highlighted. Introduction ....................................................... 168 I. Background on Climate Migration ............................. 170 II. Rights and Funding Gaps ..................................... 175 A. Rights Gap ............................................... 177 B. Funding Gap ............................................. 181 III. Three Leading Proposals ...................................... 185 A. Docherty & Giannini and Hodgkinson et al. ................ 186 B. Biermann and Boas ....................................... 188 IV. Limitations of Proposals ...................................... 190 A. Morality ................................................. 190 B. Practicality ............................................... 196 C. Political Feasibility ....................................... 200 V. Alternatives .................................................. 203 A. The Rights Gap ........................................... 205 * Professor of Law, New York University School of Law. Thank you to my colleagues Michael Oppenheimer and Richard Stewart who encouraged me to work on this Article after I guest lectured on climate migration in their class on Global Environmental Governance in the spring of 2011. The Article benefited from conversations and email exchanges with them and their students, as well as Jutta Brunn´ ee, Dale Jamieson, Nancy Morawetz, and Liam Murphy; a Skype presentation to the Human Rights and Borders Workshop at the Academic Center for Law and Business in Ramat Gan, Israel during which I received helpful comments from Itamar Mann; and the work of the Harvard Environmental Law Review. Bonnie Docherty, Benedict Kingsbury, Jane McAdam, Bryce Rudyk, and Richard Stewart graciously read the Article in draft form and provided many very helpful comments and suggestions. Elizabeth Hallinan and Scott Snyder provided excellent research assistance. The Filomen D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund at New York University School of Law provided generous financial assistance.
RESPONSES TO CLIMATE MIGRATION
Jul 11, 2023
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