Looking beyond the climate refugee.

• Position: YOUR LIFE

Between 2008-13, some 140,000,000 people were displaced by weather-related disasters. Meanwhile, gradual displacements, such as those caused by droughts or sea-level rise, affected the lives of countless others. These "climate refugees" have become the human face of global warming, their very movement seen as a threat to global security.

According to Francois Gemenne, contributing author of "State of the World 2015" by the Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C., there is a danger in misrepresenting climate-induced migration as a decision of last resort, rather than as a choice in human adaptation.

"The conception of migrants solely as victims ... might actually hinder their capacity to adapt, and induce inadequate policy responses," writes Gemenne, executive director of the Politics of the Earth program at Sciences Po (Paris, France) and a senior research associate with the University of Liege (Wallonia, Belgium).

Today's policies on climate change cast migration as an impending humanitarian catastrophe and as a failure to adapt to changing environments back home. As a result, policies focus on reducing migration, commonly assuming that overwhelming flows of migrants from poor countries will be flooding industrialized countries.

"Current adaptation policies tend to focus on the right to stay." Today, governments are aiming to reduce the number of people who are forced to migrate, ignoring those who might, in fact, prefer to leave but are forced to...