simple and legalistic, such as a mechanism for renun-
ciation and acquisition of nationality (United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees 2009a), to the complex
and fundamental, such as whether to allow collapsed
states to remain as legal fictions or whether to permit
the return of ungoverned territories on a scale not seen
since the early 19th century.
More People, Fewer Places
Ecomigration is no simple phenomenon. Its causes
are several, interwoven, and complex (Hugo 2008). To
date, environmental factors alone have not driven, and
for the foreseeable future will not drive, ecomigration
beyond temporary internal moves related to extreme
weather events, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the
floods in Pakistan in 2010, for instance. Soon, how-
ever, the growing world population and accelerating
trajectory of climate change may cause environmental
factors to play a greater role in stimulating ecomigra-
tion while concomitantly constraining the options to
address it.
The Earth has more people than ever before, and
its population will grow more than 32 per cent by 2050
(Evans 2010). Climate change, coupled with popula-
tion density, resource scarcity, and environmental
degradation, is likely to mean that fewer places will be
habitable. And the fewer places there are to live, the
more unbalanced and volatile various regions could
become. Moderating conditions in the high Northern
and low Southern Hemispheres may off-set the loss
of habitable areas between the Tropics of Capricorn
and Cancer, but continued population growth could
largely negate the gain. Migration patterns, first in-
ternal and then external, often from rural settings to
urban, and from underdeveloped states to developed