Climate change, environmental degradation and the reproduction of social inequalities

Climate change and environmental degradation have been frequently discussed as drivers of migration and forced migration in academic and public debates. The number of peer-reviewed journal article publications per year about the topic has continuously increased, particularly after 2010. The topics of interest have shifted from a focus on vulnerability, land degradation, refugees and security towards concepts such as climate justice, sustainability, human rights and disaster risk reduction. This chapter traces existing research into the climate change-migration debate. The main argument is that we need a new generation of research which devotes more attention to how responses to environmental degradation in general and climate change in particular, including migration (as adaptation), are implicated in producing and reproducing social inequalities. The first part traces selected public and academic discourses and thus various positions on climate-migration issues. A second section delineates three generations of research in this field. To overcome the disjunction of nature and culture, ecology, and society, is at the core of the third section. A fourth and concluding part offers a sketch of research sensitive to social inequalities (re)produced in the course of climate change.