Providing New Homes for Climate Change Exiles
Climate Policy, Vol. 6, pp. 247-252, 2006
6 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2006 Last revised: 19 Oct 2014
Abstract
Given a certain pre-existing commitment to sea-level rise due to the long thermal lags of the ocean system, several million people living in coastal areas and small islands will inevitably be displaced by the middle of the century. These climate exiles will have nowhere to go. Rather than deal with this in an ad hoc manner as the problem arises, the authors propose a mechanism by which these exiles would be given immigration benefits by countries through a formula that ties numbers of immigrants to a country's historical greenhouse gas emissions. Such a compensatory mechanism appears to be a fair way of addressing the problems faced by climate exiles.
Keywords: Climate-change, Sea-level rise, Immigration, Adaptation, Climate justice, migration
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