Washington, DC, September 19. We’re excited to share a published review of the anthology “Climate Migration: Critical Perspectives for Law, Policy, and Research,” edited by Calum Nicholson and Benoit Mayer. The book explores the complexities and challenges of understanding the relationship between climate change and migration, challenging some common assumptions in this field. In his review, Ira Feldman, founder of Adaptation Leader, provides a thought-provoking analysis, highlighting how the volume pushes for a more nuanced, evidence-based discussion around “climate migration.” Ira’s full review, published in the Journal of Environmental Studies & Sciences (JESS), is available at: https://www.adaptationleader.org/?r3d=review-climate-migration-critical-perspectives-for-law-policy-and-research
As the review notes, it’s a call to rethink how we frame and address climate-related migration and to ensure that policy and law are built on solid foundations. The volume builds off a 2019 piece by nearly three dozen authors (several of whom contributed to the book) in Nature Climate Change, (Boas et al. 2019) which sounded the alarm that much academic and policy work about climate and migration is epistemologically half-baked, founded on misleading claims. Far from being a self-evident fact, “cat- egorizing climate migrants as distinguishable from ‘non- climate migrants’ is not empirically possible in most, if not all, circumstances,” and hence, “predictions of mass climate- induced migration are inherently flawed” (Boas et al. 2019, p. 901).