The Right to Remain in a Changing Climate: A Legal Perspective on Climate (Im)mobilities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v19n3p862-881Keywords:
Climate (Im)mobilities, Human Rights, Right to Remain, Right to Stay, Voluntary ImmobilityAbstract
Climate change is rendering many places increasingly unsafe or difficult to inhabit with dignity, raising fundamental questions about how human rights respond to changing relationships between people and place. While climate mobility scholarship has predominantly focused on those who move, considerably less attention has been paid to communities for whom freedom of movement also encompasses the possibility of remaining.
This article examines how existing legal frameworks can ground and give content to emerging claims to a “right to remain” in the context of climate-related (im)mobilities. Rather than proposing a new standalone right, it argues that claims to remain can draw on existing human rights, climate justice, and self-determination. Staying is further approached as a meaningful exercise of agency, shaped by people’s attachments, capabilities, constraints, and aspirations.
Methodologically, a socio-legal approach brings insights from human geography, environmental psychology, and climate mobility scholarship into dialogue with a doctrinal analysis of international human rights, climate, and environmental law. This place lived experiences of remaining in dialogue with the legal protections and obligations that may sustain them.
The analysis identifies important, albeit fragmented, legal foundations for a right to remain, particularly through freedom of movement and residence, culture, self-determination, environmental protection, and protection against arbitrary displacement. Read together, these foundations point beyond a narrow legal focus on preventing displacement towards States’ positive obligations to sustain the material, cultural, and environmental conditions that make remaining possible with dignity. Recognising a right to remain in law is only a first step: giving it substantive meaning requires attention to the diverse ways in which staying is understood and exercised. By bringing these dimensions into dialogue, the article contributes to emerging scholarship on the right to remain by connecting its legal foundations with the lived realities of staying.
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