Building and maintaining a global federal government won’t be easy: plenty of things could go awry along the way, and plenty more could go sour even after the government was up and running. The world’s peoples may respond to severe climate change by retrenching into regional or national enclaves. The global legislature could become gridlocked in a manner similar to the UN during the Cold War. One nation or group of nations could succeed in gaining unilateral control over the global government, resulting either in an Orwellian superstate or in a catastrophic planetary civil war. These scenarios form a perfectly real and plausible possibility for our collective future – and the coming generations will need to be ever-vigilant in their efforts to prevent them from happening.

This chapter debates the displacement impacts of climate change. Is there a need for some sort of law on ‘climate migration’? Above all, does it make sense to talk about climate migration as a discrete phenomenon? Ingrid Boas argues that ‘climate mobility’ is real and observable and takes many forms (hence climate mobilities), including that of immobility (the decision to stay put despite the pressures to move). She makes the case for this phenomenon being a proper subject of research and governance. Calum Nicholson, by contrast, argues that climate migration researchers literally have no idea what they are talking about. These scholars, he claims, have made a virtue of imprecision in order to keep attracting research grants to study the individual experiences of those allegedly affected by the impacts of climate change, from which no generalizations could possibly be drawn.

This chapter debates the displacement impacts of climate change. Is there a need for some sort of law on ‘climate migration’? Above all, does it make sense to talk about climate migration as a discrete phenomenon? Ingrid Boas argues that ‘climate mobility’ is real and observable and takes many forms (hence climate mobilities), including that of immobility (the decision to stay put despite the pressures to move). She makes the case for this phenomenon being a proper subject of research and governance. Calum Nicholson, by contrast, argues that climate migration researchers literally have no idea what they are talking about. These scholars, he claims, have made a virtue of imprecision in order to keep attracting research grants to study the individual experiences of those allegedly affected by the impacts of climate change, from which no generalizations could possibly be drawn.

Chapter 2 explores the securitization of climate change by engaging with the scholarly debate around environmental and climate security, human security, water and food security, and climate-induced migration. The chapter traces the broadening of traditional security studies to include non-Western perspectives and a more diverse array of potential threats, including environmental degradation, poverty, water scarcity, and climate change. This theoretical review provides the foundation for the discussion of a potential climate-food insecurity and migration nexus. The author shows that the literature has not conclusively shown linkages between climate change, food insecurity, migration and conflict – either globally or in Syria – but that the HECS framework can be used to rigorously evaluate the interactions between these variables. A key theme of this chapter is the need to recognize and prioritize non-Western and marginalized perspectives and agency in environmental security and migration discourses.