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Julia Neusner and Ama Francis

Read the report Public Health and Human Health Implications of Climate Mobility in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive repository here. 

By Ama Ruth Francis

Environmental events—including droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea level rise and earthquakes play a role alongside socioeconomic and political factors in triggering displacement, migration and planned relocation in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). LAC countries experience the strongest relationship between environmental hazards and migration in the world. From 2008 to 2019, there were more than 23 million reported incidents of internal displacement in the context of disasters linked to sudden- and slowonset hazards linked to disasters. LAC has developed a significant normative framework in response to environmental mobility, especially relative to other regions. In practice, LAC countries use regional refugee law, regional mobility agreements, and regular and exceptional migration categories in national immigration law to extend admission and stay to LAC nationals moving across borders in the context of climate change and disasters. In theory, other mechanisms also strengthen the normative framework, including visa-free travel and recognition of the principle of non-refoulement, although law and policy on internal environmental mobility needs further development. Grounded in principles of regional refugee law, regional integration, and national immigration law, LAC’s relatively robust normative framework already facilitates the movement of LAC nationals in the context of climate change and disasters, and demonstrates that existing legal tools are available for addressing environmental mobility.

Read the article Regional Paper on Global Governance of Environmental Mobility: Latin America & the Caribbean in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive. 

By Ama Ruth Francis

Migrants have the power to make international law as norm creators. The nation-state enjoys a monopoly on violence in domestic jurisgenesis, but international law’s constraint on the use of force provides non-state actors the opportunity to participate in the formation of international legal doctrine without the threat of violence. Scholars have overlooked this non state jurisgenerative potential, bound by a state-centric conception of law. This Article applies the claim that non-state actors have the power to influence international law to the transnational issue of climate-induced migration. Climate change intensifies slow- and sudden-onset events, and sudden-onset disasters already displace millions annually. Yet international law grants nation-states the right to largely exclude foreigners such that climate migrants have no right to enter another country, resettle, or be protected against forcible return when they are displaced across borders. While liberal scholars defend this right to exclude as necessary for the preservation of sovereignty, the majority of nation-states participate in free movement agreements—regional trade agreements that promote migration—demonstrating that sovereignty and exclusion are not mutually constitutive.

Ultimately, I leverage the challenge of climate-induced migration to ask who has the power to change international law. My response proceeds in two parts. First, the Article challenges the state-centric focus of international law to call attention to non-state actors’ ability to create legal norms. Second, I draw on diasporic theory to argue that the Global South diaspora—Global Southerners living in the Global North—should leverage their hybrid positionally to create legal norms that reconstitute sovereignty through admission. International migration theorists reproduce the paradigmatic image of a Global North and Global South border contest, and foreclose the possibility of migrant’s jurisgenerative capacity. This Article intentionally shifts the frame to highlight the power that a territorially-unbounded Global South people have to shape international legal norms.

Read the article Migrants Can Make International Law in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive. 

By Ama Ruth Francis

This white paper uses the Caribbean as a case study to demonstrate the utility of Free Movement Agreements in providing a protection framework for climate-induced migration in the absence of a governing multilateral framework and guaranteed rights. This white paper also presents an opportunity to consider climate-induced migration in a Caribbean context, whereas most research on human mobility and climate change in relation to SIDS has focused on the Pacific. 

Read the report FMAs & Climate-Induced Migration in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.

By Dena Adler, Michael Burger, Rob Moore, Joel Scata. 

This Comment will assess the current state of the NFIP and the threats to it from climate change (Part I). In addition, it explores several strategies to change the NFIP for a changing climate.

Read the report Changing the National Flood Insurance Program for a Changing Climate in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.

By Michael B. Gerrard

This article explains why the international pledges submitted for the Paris Agreement are not enough to avoid serious impacts on people and communities - specifically, impacts leading to the displacement of millions of people from their home.

Read the article Sadly, The Paris Agreement Isn't Nearly Enough in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.

By Phillip Dane Warren

Note: Climate change represents, perhaps, the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century. As temperatures and sea levels rise, governments around the world will face massive and unprecedented human displacement that international law currently has no mechanism to address. While estimates vary, the scope of the migration crisis that the world will face in the coming decades is startling. In addition to losing their homes, climate change migrants, under current law, will encounter a refugee system governed by a decades-old Refugee Convention that offers neither protection nor the right to resettle in a more habitable place. Armed with the most recent developments in international climate change law following the December 2015 Paris climate conference (COP21), this Note considers which of the existing bodies in the United Nations is best equipped to address forced migration caused by climate change. Inspired by the negotiations leading up to the Paris Conference, this Note advocates for a Climate Change Displacement Coordination Facility, housed within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to protect the rights of displaced persons. Finally, this Note maps out an institutional architecture and a long-term vision for a Displacement Coordination Facility. As opposed to an amendment of the 1951 Refugee Convention or a new rights-based treaty for climate migration, a Facility housed within the UNFCCC provides the greatest possible flexibility, autonomy, and cultural retention for climate change migrants while still protecting their essential human rights.

By Michael B. Gerrard

Presented at Judges’ Summit on Human Trafficking and Organized Crime Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Read the report Climate Change and Human Trafficking After the Paris Climate Agreement in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.

By Justin Gundlach, Channing Jones

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s community development block grant disaster recovery program (CDBG-DR) can better and more clearly incorporate climate resilience and adaptation priorities. This article identifies and analyzes the statutes that have guided HUD's approach to disaster recovery to date, as well as forms of “soft guidance” issued by HUD for use by various stakeholders, including both HUD CDBG-DR program officers and the state and local officials that interact with them. Comparing these materials reveals a tension between the requirement that all projects funded by CDBG-DR “tie back” to the most recent disaster, and the logic of resilience, which holds that one should always build or rebuild with an eye to the next disaster. The article notes some signs that HUD is working to reconcile this tension and suggests ways for HUD to carry potential forms of reconciliation forward into future disaster recovery contexts. Published in Volume 46 of Environmental Law Reporter.

Read the article Integrating Climate Change Resilience Into HUD’s Disaster Recovery Program in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.

By David Markell

Read the report Sea-Level Rise and Changing Times for Florida Local Governments in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.

Note: This working paper reviews three recent developments, which relate primarily to comprehensive planning in Florida, and explores their implications for Florida’s local governments, among others. It begins with the State’s decision, in 2011 legislation, to give local governments a new, optional tool – referred to as “Adaptation Action Areas” (AAAs) – to address sea-level rise and related issues in local comprehensive plans. The paper then turns to a second piece of Florida legislation, this one enacted in 2015, which also identifies sea-level rise as a concern but this time mandates that local governments begin to address it and other causes of flood-related risks through their comprehensive planning process. Finally, the paper discusses a third initiative, launched in 2009 by four Southeast Florida counties – Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Monroe – to foster local government and regional coordination on sea-level rise and other climate change issues. This review of these three developments provides a relatively in-depth starting point for understanding key features of the emerging legal and institutional landscape in Florida for addressing sea-level rise, especially with respect to comprehensive planning. It thereby contributes to filling an enormous knowledge deficit concerning adaptation initiatives.