Evaluating Climate Migration

Abstract

Climate change will negatively impact human communities and ecosystems, including driving increased food insecurity, increased exposure to disease, loss of livelihood and worsening poverty. Recent climate debates have focused attention on climate migrants, people who are displaced by the ecological stresses caused by climate change. To date, these debates have focused a great deal of attention on state security issues and have left the gender implications largely unexplored. In this article we examine the securitization of climate migration debates through gender lenses. We find that gender helps reveal and focus attention on the human security implications of climate migration and offers a useful discourse for climate policymaking.

Keywords:

• climate change
• climate migration
• gender and migration
• human security
• security

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this article. We accept any errors as our own.

Notes on contributors

Nicole Detraz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis. Her research centers on the connections between gender, security and the environment. She is the author of International Security and Gender (Polity Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in Global Environmental Politics, International Studies Perspectives and Security Studies.

Leah Windsor is an Instructor of Political Science at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on the political consequences of natural disasters. She is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Institute for Intelligent Systems focusing on political linguistics.

Notes

1 For example, studies like Feng et al. (2010) use an instrumental variables approach to quantitatively examine the linkages among variations in climate, agricultural yields and people's migration. They find that the USA can expect an additional 1.4 to 6.7 million Mexican immigrants between 2010 and 2080 solely attributable to the effects of climate change on Mexican agriculture.

2 There are also gendered implications of predicted resource conflicts that may accompany climate change (Homer-Dixon 1999; Detraz 2009).