Migration and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change: A Right to Livability

• In Event: Climate Change and Global Governance

Abstract

The influence of climate change on human mobilities includes instances of both migration and immobility, with varying degrees of individual agency across such outcomes. Yet in the current international policy landscape, climate mobilities are addressed primarily in terms of involuntary movement across national borders. In this paper, we propose a novel normative framework for addressing climate mobilities that encompasses the full heterogeneity of possible outcomes. This framework, based on a right to a livable space, provides a principled approach for determining the nature of obligations to protect those at risk. We show that it offers moral and pragmatic advantages to prevalent normative approaches. Importantly, we identify the global climate regime under the Paris Agreement as a key governance framework for protecting a right to livability. Yet for Paris to successfully support the implementation of this right, we contend that further delineation of its normative scope is required, especially as pertaining to its new Loss & Damage pillar. We suggest several pathways to that end and demonstrate that making climate mobilities more central to the Paris Agreement raises important considerations for how we ought to interpret Loss & Damage as it assumes a more prominent role in the climate regime.

Authors

• Simona Mila Capisani, Durham University

• Hélène Benveniste, Stanford University