Part of the seminar series Thinking our environmental future: Conversations on the environment, climate and ethics

The influence of climate change on mobilities is complex, and possible outcomes of the mobility-climate nexus range from instances of mobility to immobility, with varying degrees of agency across such outcomes. Yet climate-related mobility, is largely portrayed in the media and in the public debate through the lens of one specific outcome: displacement across borders, particularly from non-Western to Western countries. These foci appear reflected in the current international policy landscape relevant for climate mobilities as well. The global climate change regime under the 2015 Paris Agreement (PA) is somewhat more expansive in its consideration of the challenges climate-related mobilities . Yet the focus of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s institutional arrangements with regard to mobility as described in the PA remains narrow: first, it regards displacement as the central problem requiring address; second, it consigns climate mobilities to the Warsaw international mechanism for Loss & Damage (L&D). Consequently, the current setup is both normatively and practically limited in its capacity to address the whole range of mobility outcomes resulting from climate change.

In this talk, we propose a novel normative framework for addressing climate mobilities justice which addresses the full heterogeneity of climate mobility outcomes and provides a principled approach for determining the nature of the obligations to protect those at risk. Both tasks are critical for evaluating and further developing international governance mechanisms for addressing climate-related mobilities. We argue that our framework, based on the right to a livable space, not only offers moral and pragmatic advantages on prevalent normative approaches but also identifies the potential of the global climate regime under the Paris Agreement as mechanism to protect this right, consequently identifying its potential as a key governance framework for meeting justice-based requirements of climate mobilities.

While we highlight the advantages of the Paris Agreement as a governance mechanism, we also demonstrate that more must be done for it to satisfy the demands of climate-mobilities justice. To do so we suggest that further evaluation of the normative scope of Loss & Damage is required. Depending on how this new pillar of the climate change regime will evolve in coming years, we provide several options describing how the Paris Agreement can meet the demands of climate mobilities justice by identifying various approaches to understanding the L&D and Adaptation pillars, how they relate to each other, and the consequence of their relation for climate-related mobilities. By making climate mobilities more central to the Paris Agreement, we demonstrate how doing so raises important considerations for how we ought to interpret L&D as it assumes a more prominent role in the global climate regime.