The editorial team of this Bristol University Press book series on Global Migration and Social Change are delighted to bring you Sarah Louise Nash's new book, Negotiating Migration in the Context of Climate Change: International Policy and Discourse.

The aim of the series as a whole is to spur new discussions among a diverse disciplinary audience by publishing migration and refugee studies research that is at once academically ground-breaking and engaged with the most pressing policy issues. The series was conceived during the unfolding of the Eurozone and migration crises of 2016, coverage of which helped drive the Brexit referendum result in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the USA; we wanted the series to examine migration through the lens of the crises and the broader changes of our era.

It is hard to imagine a more pressing policy issue than climate change. A good deal of the topic's salience derives from its relationship with issues of human migration. Nash's aim is to study what has become known as the climate change and migration nexus: a discourse in which climate change and migration are interrelated issues, both requiring urgent policy responses. Nash's contribution to the series is therefore extremely relevant and timely.

The book also highlights links between the European crises – which formed the context to our launch of this series – to the fraught politics and policy surrounding climate change. For example, the so-called European migration crisis coincided with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Paris, where questions of migration were already on the agenda, not least because of the way fears of future ‘climate change refugees’ were sometimes being leveraged to motivate climate action in troubling ways.

This is an exceptionally well-written, thoughtful and novel book. It thoroughly and chronologically details the evolution of global climate change and migration policy making: a topic that is already at the top of the international policy-making agenda and which is certain to become increasingly important in coming decades. As well as a guide to current commentators, this book will stand as a historical record of a key moment in the evolution of the global regimes for both environment and migration.