This book cuts to the core of the burgeoning literature on climate-induced migration, reviews the complex challenges and opportunities relating to climate mobility within an interdisciplinary perspective, and critically assesses them using a human rights-based approach. It focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, considered to be the hot spot for climate-induced displacement, having been host to almost 80 percent of all global disaster displacements, and with a wide array of case studies ranging from Bangladesh, Thailand, and Vietnam to Bhutan and the Solomon Islands.

The biggest portion of the book is concerned with the perpetuation of vulnerabilities to climate change, with special attention being accorded to women, indigenous peoples, and persons with disabilities, for example, dealing with the gendered and indigenous dimensions of climate-induced floodings of Bangladesh and Vietnam and the combined impact of land grabbing and environmental degradation on the indigenous communities of Indonesia. The editors emphasize that planned relocation and resettlement are preventive ways to protect communities in conditions of risk.

However, the book also warns that there are human rights risks linked to such relocations if they are not treated appropriately and calls for inclusive policies based on local realities that consider entangled human mobility in a nuanced light.

This book attempts to bridge the chasm between climate change discourse and human rights law by placing climate mobility within the broad meaning of the international human rights framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Paris Agreement and progressively adopts an interdisciplinary approach by referring to law, political ecology, disaster management, and social work. It presents ample empirical data and instructive case studies, but the legal mechanisms and obligations that can be employed to take charge of cross-border climate mobility remain an under-examined area, and internal displacement could have been discussed with more balance and perhaps placed in relation to international migration and the roles of recipient countries. This monograph complements existing studies, such as Jane McAdam’s Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law (University of Oxford, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), by providing a more region-specific analysis with a strong emphasis on human rights. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the volume puts serious attention on local scholarship as a primary means through which the Global South is given a voice to an emerging climate mobility discourse whose diversity and representation need increased support.

Editors Jolly and Ahmad, based at the South Asian University, are proficient in the areas of international environmental law and refugee law, respectively, and Scott is from the Raoul Wallenberg Institute and has written on human rights and environmental law. This book adeptly presents the complex dynamics around climate-induced migration in one of the most vulnerable regions across the world and is crucial reading for those framing future policies and interventions related to climate mobility.