Anthropogenic climate change is inflicting serious loss and damage on some of the most vulnerable areas of the globe. In the future, a particularly vexing kind of that loss will be territorial. The continuously rising sea level is projected to submerge - or to otherwise make uninhabitable - not only large swaths of the territory of e.g. Bangladesh and the Netherlands, but also all of the island nations of e.g. Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and the Maldives. Therefore, we must adapt to climate change rather than merely attempt to mitigate it. In particular, territorial losses must be compensated. Noncompliance makes the ideal of territorial compensation elusive and grounds the need for non-ideal theory. Here, I seek to develop such a theory. Specifically, I (i) introduce background considerations, (ii) address challenges to compensatory liability, (iii) situate the paper within non-ideal theory, (iv) offer an ideal of territorial compensation to guide non-ideal theory, (v) discuss previous migration proposals, and (vi) argue for a non-ideal theory of collective climate migration.
Wündisch, J
Towards a non-ideal theory of climate migration
Critical Review Of International Social And Political Philosophy