Toward a Justice Framework for Understanding and Responding to Climate Migration and Displacement

A recent state-of-the-art review on how environmental migrants are being conceptualized identified four framings being used for designing response policies: victims, security threats, adaptive agents, and political subjects. Missing from this typology is a framing corresponding to concerns of climate justice, which would conceptualize climate migrants or refugees as owed reparation. This article (1) enumerates and describes the nature of the injustices for which migrants are owed; (2) distinguishes a justice framing from other frames that only partially considers climate justice; and (3) offers some preliminary thoughts on how a justice framing might become more prominent and its prescriptions more achievable.