Climate Migration Justice: From Individual Decisions to Legal Protection

Abstract

Climate change is already displacing millions of people worldwide, yet the existing policy and legal frameworks governing mobility decisions, disaster recovery, and migrant protection remain inadequate. Dominant approaches to climate mobility tend to treat displacement as a technocratic problem of environmental management rather than as a site where histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and unequal development are reproduced and contested. This three-article dissertation addresses this gaps by examining how structural conditions shape climate mobility across three stages: the decision to migrate, the policy landscape encountered during and after climate events, and the availability of legal protection for those who cross international borders.The first chapter develops a theory of deferred climate-related migration. Using original survey data from 1,534 households across Guatemala, it challenges the prevailing assumption that rapid-onset events trigger immediate displacement while slow-onset events produce gradual migration. Floods increase both internal migration plans (by 4.3 percentage points) and international migration plans (by 4.8 percentage points) two to seven years after exposure, while neither hurricanes nor droughts significantly affect migration plans during this timeframe. Migration networks prove critical, as individuals exposed to floods with prior migration experience are fourteen times more likely to plan internal migration than those without. The chapter proposes that floods create a unique temporal window for migration by being severe enough to signal persistent risk while allowing sufficient recovery time to accumulate resources, activate networks, and coordinate plans.The second chapter, co-authored with David Leblang, examines racial disparities in U.S. environmental migration. Drawing on individual-level data from North and South Carolina in 2018 and county-to-county migration data across all U.S. counties from 2006 to 2016, it finds a consistent pattern: after floods, Black out-migration generally decreases while White populations are unaffected. This pattern reverses when the Federal Emergency Management Agency provides financial support through its Individual Assistance Program. As FEMA funding to a county increases, Black migration increases and White migration significantly decreases. These results provide the first systematic evidence of racial disparities in environmental migration and demonstrate that ostensibly neutral disaster-recovery policies can reproduce and deepen structural inequalities.The third chapter builds a theory of strategic litigation for protecting climate migrants. Drawing from the Earth Refuge Legal Database and its successor, it analyzes relevant precedents in major receiving country destinations as well as international courts. The analysis reveals that the most successful claims have bypassed the 1951 Refugee Convention’s persecution requirement, grounding protection instead in state omission under ICCPR Article 6, subsidiary protection regimes, and constitutional rights frameworks. Building on these findings, the chapter proposes a strategic litigation framework organized around forum selection, affirmative claims for establishing legal status, defensive strategies for resisting removal, and accountability claims targeting state and corporate duties.The central finding across all three chapters is that climate mobility outcomes are determined less by the environmental signal itself than by the structural conditions through which that signal is channeled. Perceptions of recoverability shape whether people decide to move. Disaster-recovery policies determine who can rebuild and who is pushed out. Legal systems define who receives protection and on what terms. Ultimately, achieving climate mobility justice requires not only reforming individual policies but confronting the historical legacies and ongoing power structures that make displacement predictable and protection unequal.