Publications
Image: Pacific Coast (somewhere between Santa Cruz and San Francisco), 2016
My areas of specialty are in environmental politics and governance, political and environmental philosophy, and ethics (normative and applied). While grounded in political philosophical reasoning, my research is interdisciplinary in scope. I engage with policy and legal theorizing, as well as international relations, environmental studies, human geography, and gender studies. In my work I focus on justice-based considerations and the disproportinate impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on (both human and non-human) communities by examining governance institutions and interlocking systems of structural inequality.
research overview:
My research examines the moral, political, and legal challenges that emerge for the international territorial state system under conditions of environmental and societal change. For example, climate change introduces a shift in the background empirical conditions within which our current practices take place. We can no longer assume territorial stability or habitability, for example. This requires us to re-evaluate common conceptions that have been central to the practice of the territorial state system (such as territorial sovereignty) and to identify and examine underlying values for environmental governance. My work takes a justice-based, principled approach to examining the role of values and underlying conceptions for institutional change and the development of environmental governance frameworks to address pressing issues such as climate-induced displacement and migration, adaptation, geoengineering, and the need for more synergized biodiversity and climate policy design and implementation.
livability:
Instances of displacement already occurring, along with predictions about the scale and scope of future climate change-induced migration and immobility raise significant moral questions in addition to a range of political and legal challenges facing the international community. Should international law protect people who are forced to leave their country of birth and citizenship due to the effects of climate change? Who has a responsibility to aid people whose mobility is negatively impacted by slow and rapid-onset climate events? What are these obligations and what is the moral foundation from which they arise? To meet the challenges of climate displacement, migration, and immobility, our current social, legal, and political practices require restructuring.
My current work provides a justice-based principled approach to climate mobilities - what I call the livability framework. The livability framework is sensitive to context and addresses the heterogeneity of climate mobilities. I establish normative and policy-focused arguments across several published peer-reviewed journal articles. I argue that the justification for institutional or policy changes regarding climate mobilities can emerge from the territorial state system understood as a social practice. Such justification arises from the practice’s own internal regulative principles as it is currently understood. This framework is advantageous in that it starts with facts about our current practices and addresses real-world empirical conditions in moral reasoning about the state system and the principles which underlie its international protection regime and (im)migration norms. This body of research also includes a specific focus on gender in the context of climate-related mobilities.
values for climate & nature governance:
In addition to climate mobilities governance, my work address other structural injustices and challenges in environmental politics. The following is a brief summary of my ongoing research interests and current work: (1) the relationship between climate change governance and key financial institutions and instruments such as insurance and pensions; (2) bottom-up governance mechanisms for soil health; (3) the role of subnational actors in mainstreaming biodiversity and synergizing climate and biodiversity implementation; (4) the relationship between local democratic governance and the politics of fire; (5) geoengineering governance and its relationship to the politics of decomissioning. Additionally, (6) I am currently extending the application of the livability framework to address novel conservation challenges and practices. In the latter work, I draw from my normative conception of livability to evaluate responsibilities for conservation interventions under conditions of worsening habitat loss and anthropogenic climate change.
academic publications:
2020. "Territorial Instability and the Right to a Livable Locality," Environmental Ethics 42(2): 189–207. (PDF)
Territory loss and uninhabitability characterize the current environmental background conditions of the international state system. Such conditions present pressing moral questions about our obligations to protect those who are displaced by anthropogenic climate change. By virtue of our participation in the territorial state system, understood as a social practice, we have principled grounds to address some of the consequences of the uninhabitability conditions brought on by climate change. By assuming territorial instability and employing a practice-based method of justification we can identify a fundamental, basic right protected under the state system – the right to a livable locality – which grounds a moral obligation to protect against climate change-induced displacement. Assuming territorial instability and uninhabitability compels us to recognize that the causes generating climate-displacement are not merely natural but rather deeply political and that displacement is a foreseeable failure that results because of the state system’s organizational structure.
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics2020111816
2021. “Livability and a Framework for Climate Mobilities Justice” Philosophy and Public Issues: Migration and Justice for People on the Move, 11(1). (PDF)
Due to anthropogenic climate change, the “human climate niche” is shrinking and shifting. There is a significant possibility that nearly twenty percent of the planet’s available land surface will be uninhabitable by 2070 and the significant expansion of such spaces could impact close to thirty percent of the projected human population. Political, social, and economic decisions about infrastructure, including the social and built environment, rights, public services, health care, housing, governance schemes, and a range of other institutions and elements will play a significant role in determining whether climate impacts will exacerbate current inequalities and increase negative impacts on human well-being. In this way, a shifting human climate niche, its relationship to human mobility, and how we respond to its impacts are laden with significant normative questions about whether and to what extent justice-based interventions are required. In short, the shifting human climate niche’s relationship to mobility outcomes raises the question of climate mobilities justice. This paper develops a key element of a larger “practice-based approach” to climate mobilities justice. The framework is inclusive of the full mobility spectrum and shifts the normative focus to outcomes rather than focusing solely on questions of distributive justice of resources. I argue that livability, understood as a “functioning” (on a capabilities approach) captures the relevantly normative relationship between people and place in a territorial state system. This conceptualization of livability illuminates that the social practice of the territorial state system establishes an obligation to facilitate people’s adaptation to different spaces as well as facilitate changes to spaces to adapt to the interests of those who exist in a co-constitutive relationship with such spaces. The paper establishes a foundation for why a multi-faceted approach to addressing climate mobilities justice is needed, and why a diverse range of solutions may be necessary to discharge our obligation to those at risk.
2023. “Climate Change and Human Mobilities” in The Springer Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, edited by Marcello di Paolo. (PDF)
Human migration has long been a type of adaptive response to climatic conditions and environmental pressures. However, anthropogenic climate change threatens to exacerbate vulnerabilities and impact adaptive capacity. Climate change impacts human mobility by way of long-term climate processes as well as sudden events whose intensity and frequency are exacerbated. The heterogeneity of climate-related mobility outcomes and the difficulty in determining the scale and scope of the impact on human well-being raises a number of practical and normative challenges. The chapter examines and compares a range of normative frameworks that undergird policy and legal frameworks that aim to address the moral problem of climate change’s impacts on human mobility. These approaches articulate the nature of the moral problem, identify the rights that are violated and the associated harms of displacement, and identify correlative obligations to those who are vulnerable to climate-related impacts. The chapter concludes by suggesting further directions normative theorizing about climate-related mobilities can take considering the complex challenges the phenomena poses for international governance.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-16960-2_124-1
2025. Co-authored with Ingrid Boas et al., “Climate-induced redistribution of people is not inevitable” in Environmental Research Letters.
As climate change intensifies, scientific and policy discussions increasingly address questions of future habitability and potential population movements. In this perspective, we caution against premature or top-down characterizations of areas as uninhabitable, or portrayals of large-scale climate-induced displacement as inevitable—particularly when the perspectives and preferences of affected populations are excluded. While we recognize the importance of modelling and scenario-building to assess future risks, we argue that such efforts must be grounded in local realities and include diverse forms of knowledge. Habitability is not determined by climate alone, but emerges from intersecting environmental, political, economic, and cultural dynamics—including governance, inequality, and historical injustice. Framings that do not consider this risk producing two problematic outcomes: first, by prematurely defining areas as uninhabitable, they may undermine the legitimacy of in-situ adaptation and the agency of affected communities; second, when modelling or the use of modelling results does not consider local context, it may inadvertently contribute to narratives portraying climate-induced mass displacement as inevitable, reinforcing deterministic understandings of migration and overlooking the complex drivers of mobility and immobility. To counter these risks, we propose five guiding recommendations: (1) avoid declaring hard limits to habitability without inclusive, context-specific assessments; (2) treat model-based projections as possible, not predetermined futures; (3) reject simplistic global North/South assumptions in assessing vulnerability and mobility; (4) uphold people’s right to remain, alongside the right to move; and (5) prioritize investment in in-situ adaptation that addresses structural inequalities. These principles aim to inform more reflexive and justice-oriented approaches to climate mobility and habitability research—approaches that recognize lived experiences, engage diverse knowledge systems, and help secure equitable futures for those most exposed to environmental change.
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/adfdfd
2026. Co-authored with Alexander Lee & Yasha Rohwer.“Livability and Non-Human Organisms” in Biology & Philosophy. (PDF)
In a human changed world, many non-human organisms face a host of challenges related to their ability to migrate or remain in place. We argue for a right to a livable locality for non-human organisms further developing and applying arguments for a right to livability in the context of human climate migration. We argue that the right to a livable locality for non-human organisms emerges from the social practice of the international state system. We demonstrate that non-human organisms can be understood as a type of by-catch within the territorial net this social practice casts. Incorporating a right to a livable locality of non-human organisms into conservation practice is advantageous because it frees conservation from a dominant historical and normative evaluative scheme—in situ conservation. In a changing and warmer world, an over emphasis on in situ conservation makes conservation success difficult to achieve. A shift to livability considerations in conservation can guide normative evaluation in emergent conservation paradoxes and problems that arise due to environmental and climatic change.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-026-10012-0
2026. Co-authored with Sarah Haider-Nash.“Governance” in Climate & Development.
The climate (im)mobilities community is increasingly engaging with governance frameworks. This manifests in the literature in two ways. First, normatively motivated contributions engage with how climate (im)mobilities governance frameworks should be designed. Second, empirical research includes governance as a contributing factor to people’s mobility decisions. In this contribution we directly examine the notion of governance in relation to climate (im)mobilities and consider the concept of ‘climate mobilities governance’ as a subject of analysis in its own right. We argue that considerations of the complexity regarding the phenomena of climate (im)mobilities identified in the literature should be extended to the concept of governance and that doing so requires better integration of empirical and normative theorizing. We present a series of considerations for conceptualizing ‘climate (im)mobilities governance’ by extending insights from other domains of global governance, namely global environmental governance. We then clarify the relationship between normative and empirical insights with respect to these considerations and suggest a normative framework that can integrate empirical considerations when evaluating governance structures for climate (im)mobilities.
additional academic publications:
(These include special issue publications, responses & engagement with other authors, etc)
“Emphasizing Embodiment in Immigration Justice,” APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 21(2), April 2022 (PDF)
“Spatial Agency in Climate Adaptation,” Studies on Feminism and Philosophy , 22(1), November 2022 (PDF)
“Livability,” The Philosopher: The New Basics: Planet Issue, 110(1), 2022. (PDF)
public writing:
(Public writings can be accessed by clicking the title of each work)
“How to Talk To Your Children About Climate Change” co-authored w/ Kian Mintz-Woo, Irish Examiner, November 2021
“Community Building in an Online Conference” co-authored w/ Eugene Chislenko, Climate Matters American Philosophical Association, August 2021
works in progress:
(Co-authored with Hélène Benveniste & Sara Constantino & Filiz Garip)“Asymmetry of Climate-Induced Migration Decisions: Departure & Return”
Climate change has increased the frequency and severity of weather extremes, resulting in a range of responses, including adaptation in situ as well as migration out of affected communities. However, the documented effects of weather extremes on migration decisions are mixed, with some studies finding a strong positive relationship, while others find no relationship or a negative relationship. Recent research has shown that these mixed effects are, in part, explained by heterogeneous responses to weather extremes among different populations. Here, we examine another potential source of heterogeneity: departure migration decisions following extreme weather at origin may differ from return responses to weather extremes at destination. And this asymmetry may depend on the occupational and destination choices of individuals, as well as individual circumstances. On the one hand, migrants may choose, once at their destination, to work in occupations that are less exposed to weather shocks, they may be less dependent on the robustness of their social network for their return decision than for their initial move, and they may cross the border more easily on their return journey than on departure. On the other hand, they may have less flexibility to return as they are often an important source of income for household members who stay behind, they may be discouraged from returning due to stringent state or Federal immigration policies that restrict cross-border migration, or they may be forced to return if their documentation status comes into question. Using the context of cross-border migration between Mexico and the United States, the largest sustained international migration flow in the world, we expand on existing research by considering the impact of weather extremes not only on departure decisions but also on return decisions and destination location, and examining how different mechanisms, including the policy context, impact different stages of the migration journey.