Climate-induced migration is a global challenge that affects specific local communities unevenly. This chapter addresses it as an issue of climate justice via three cases concerning U.S. islands: Sarichef Island in Alaska, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, and Puerto Rico. The cases were selected for their similarities and differences concerning degrees of poverty, indigenous populations and rights, and political representation. These aspects correspond to three dimensions of injustice: economic, cultural and political. Our aim is to explore how climate migration is understood in local and transnational media and if and how issues of justice appear in selected news coverage.
To this purpose, we apply multimodal critical discourse analysis on a small sample of newspaper articles for each case. Findings indicate that transnational journalism tends to attend to economic injustice and scalar transcendence (local-global scales), while local journalism uniquely includes connections between two or more justice dimensions, which is necessary for the amendment of injustice, and scalar integration, where the needs of people are not motivated by what the rest of the world can learn, but viewed as crucial in themselves. There are also differences between the cases, indicating that acceptance for climate migration as a term varies across communities.
