Since 2014, Fairbourne, a Gwynedd village of over 400 properties, has lived under a shoreline plan that envisages withdrawing its defences by the mid-2050s and relocating residents and businesses. Its residents have been dubbed the UK’s first ‘climate refugees’. In Golspie, Sutherland, more than 100 properties stand within 50 metres of the shore, and Highland Council lists the village among 29 high-risk coastal locations.
Public debate has largely treated such cases as technical problems: how much defence is affordable, what houses are worth, where occupants might be rehoused. Recent works in political philosophy, such as Jamie Draper and David Owen’s edited volume The Political Philosophy of Internal Displacement, treat internal displacement, including climate displacement, as a matter of justice, not merely humanitarian relief. Draper’s own chapter distinguishes anticipatory from reactive displacement by how each disrupts people’s life plans. Here I ask a prior question: whether those facing an anticipatory decision can contest and shape it on equal terms, since the wrongs of climate displacement begin before anyone moves.
Two blind spots in the political philosophy of climate displacement explain why such wrongs go unseen. It has given insufficient attention to inequality, including the double burden climate change places on the already disadvantaged, and it counts too narrow a range of affected interests. Both bear directly on what a just transition requires for those affected by climate change.
The double burden
The first blind spot has a parallel in feminist studies of work, which speak of a double burden: the paid shift, and the unpaid one that follows it home. Climate displacement imposes one of its own: new climatic risk falls hardest on those already carrying disadvantage. In the UK, those most exposed to climate hazards are commonly . Golspie’s development trust reports below-average employment, health and access to services in parts of the village, and an ageing population.
Climatic hazard and socioeconomic disadvantage do not simply add up. They compound. The same flood is a different event for an owner-occupier with savings, a pension and a car than for a tenant in seasonal work or someone out of work through ill health. Whether one can insure, repair, sell up or reach work elsewhere depends on the resources that labour-market disadvantage withholds.
Henry Shue long ago warned that loading new burdens onto the unjustly disadvantaged compounds injustice. The political philosophy of climate displacement has been slow to build that insight into its standard of justice: it asks what the displaced are owed, rarely how unequal their starting points are. Threshold accounts of basic justice ask whether the displaced retain secure shelter, protection from arbitrary eviction and a fair chance to rebuild elsewhere. These protections are indispensable. But a threshold can ignore the inequalities within and between communities that determine who copes with a hazard, and can permit new inequalities provided nobody falls below the line. Such accounts often treat climatic effects in isolation, as if justice meant restoring people to where they stood before the water came. Where that was already deprivation, restoration reproduces injustice.
The alternative treats adaptation and relocation as occasions to reduce the inequalities that make some groups predictably more exposed and less able to respond: investment in local jobs and skills, in community ownership of land and energy, and in the transport, housing and care that make adaptation possible.
Which interests count?
The second blind spot concerns the domain of justice rather than its standard. The question is not only who is affected, but also which of their interests count. On a narrow conception, these are shelter, basic services, compensation for lost property and ‘as good’ opportunities elsewhere. On a wide conception, preferred here, they include the located dimensions of life: livelihoods, social relationships, practices, belonging and collective self-government. While the nearest accounts, by Anna Stilz and Laura Santi Amantini, treat autonomy as central or begin to theorise displacement through effective control, they do not yet adequately address the full range of affected interests, or the unequal resources people have to protect them.
Consider a care worker who lives in a coastal village, walks to her clients’ homes and fits her shifts around the school day. Rehouse her in a market town 20 miles inland and, on the narrow conception, justice is done: her housing is adequate and her extra travel compensated. On the wide conception, she loses the fit between paid work and unpaid care that her location made possible, the clients she can no longer reach, and the support she gave and received as a neighbour. Much of the work that sustains a community, from crewing the lifeboat to sitting on the community council, is just as bound to place. The narrow conception also falls unequally. Those with savings and easy access to a car can rebuild such ties elsewhere, whereas those who rely on walkable work and neighbourly care cannot.
The wide conception also covers a community’s own priorities. A seaside community may reasonably value sailing or walking by the shore, or choose to subsidise seabird-watching trips rather than a local rugby club. Justice requires preserving the community’s authority to identify and pursue such legitimate priorities, however it ranks them, rather than substituting a planner’s generic account of adequate housing, services and leisure. Two constraints keep this within bounds. It does not require that a community’s identity be frozen or its inherited hierarchies reproduced, only the best feasible conditions for self-directed continuity or reconstitution. And self-government cannot legitimate decisions that deny equal standing to internal minorities or receiving communities.
From protection to empowerment
The two blind spots share a root: measuring what the displaced are owed against a baseline of protection (shelter restored, loss compensated), which takes existing inequalities as given, rather than by whether people keep effective control over the located dimensions of their lives. Judged by control rather than protection, communities can be wronged before anyone moves: when decisions about their future are made for them rather than with them, through power they cannot effectively contest, leaving them materially unable to shape what comes next. I call the corresponding entitlement a Right Against Climatic Disempowerment. A policy honours it only if it passes three tests: legitimacy, whether decisions can be genuinely contested; equity, whether it reduces or reproduces unequal risk, resources and capacity within and between communities; and inclusion, whether a community’s full range of interests, life plans and choices is protected rather than overridden.
The lesson for the futures of work is that a just transition cannot stop at workers in carbon-intensive industries. The term was coined in the labour movement to protect workers from bearing the costs of environmental policy. Adaptation and relocation reorganise working lives too. Treating them as matters of rehousing and compensation alone repeats, community by community, the error just transition was meant to correct: asking those with least political and social power to absorb the costs of change on terms set by others. Any theory of displacement that treats inequality as background, rather than as part of the wrong, risks the same error.
Dimitrios E. Efthymiou is a political theorist and Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, working on migration ethics, theories of justice, exploitation and solidarity, and normative justifications of EU citizenship rights. A current project develops a Right Against Climatic Disempowerment for communities facing climate-driven adaptation and relocation.
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