Photo: Tarawa, Kiribati; original by Government of Kiribati, retrieved through Wikimedia, licensed through CC by 3.0. Climate change is a complex problem that is likely to pose significant challenges to human populations in the next decades. With rising seas anticipated in the near future, people will be forcibly displaced, posing existential challenges to some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Though the international community has thus far found it difficult to find meaningful solutions to this issue, a pathway to protected status for environmental migrants and refugees may become necessary to protect those who are most vulnerable to climate change-induced disasters such as flood
Image: Keeling Curve showing change in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over time.. Please refer to article for link to curve showing latest measurements. This image by Narayanese, Semhur, and NOAA, retrieved from Wikimedia, licensed through CC BY-SA 3.0. --- While climate change is an urgent problem with global repercussions, efforts to address this challenge have been complicated, in part, by its complexity and uncertainty. Climate change complexity arises from the interconnectedness of earth systems and the anthropogenic stressors that contribute to and aggravate the phenomenon. Climate change uncertainty, in turn, arises from the difficulty in predicting the outcomes of the non
Photo: USS Ronald Reagan in the South China Sea July 5, 2016. US Navy, CC BY 2.0 The South China Sea case (Philippines v. China) has serious ramifications for both the international legal order and the political order in Southeast Asia. The judgment, issued July 12, 2016 by a unanimous five-person Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal, found that China had violated the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), including that it had violated the Philippines’ rights to fish and had illegally caused grave harm to the environment. The judgment is approximately 500 pages long and contains important interpretations and applications of UNCLOS. Both the Philippines and China are P