In 2020, unprecedented flooding in rural areas of Afghanistan displaced thousands of Afghans. This resulted not only from more extreme storms, but also from the destruction of trees that protected and aggregated the soil. Farmers were forced to move to higher ground, local cities, and to Iran as their homes, crops, and livestock washed away. Since then, flooding has continued to increase year to year during the wet season, making the region inhabitable and contributing to global climate migration.
Climate change poses a major threat to nations around the world. In the coming decades, millions of people will be displaced as a result of natural disasters, coastline erosion, and lack of resources. As of 2021, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees released data saying that the rate of climate related migrants has risen 21.5 million since 2010, and the Institute for Economics and Peace estimates that at least 1.2 billion people will be displaced as a result of these disasters by 2050. The facts are clear: climate migration will become a major policy issue as an eighth of the world’s population is expected to migrate in the next thirty years, so how are governments responding to the looming climate-caused refugee crisis? The answer: they are not. Current policies and standing meetings like the Paris Agreement (adopted in 2015), the annual Conference of Parties (COP), and the Loss and Damage Finance Facility (LDFF) set standards for net zero emissions and began reparations work that hold major emitter, industrialized countries accountable for climate change. But these do not establish individual protections for climate migrants who are the face of climate adaptation and the bearers of environmental injustice.
Climate migrants fall into three categories: refugees, internally displaced peoples (IDPs), and stateless peoples. Yet they cannot be defined by their relation to the climate alone as they often live in the cross hairs of conflict, making them even more vulnerable. Climate hotspots are areas more susceptible to the effects of climate change, leaving the people within them particularly vulnerable. They contribute to the lack of the necessary resources needed to adapt to climate change in their regions, forcing communities to move once again. Environmental damages are even being used against minority groups in existing national conflicts, as seen in the Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. For the past three decades, Azerbaijan has demolished the biodiversity in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the disputed territory of the Armenian minority population, to make them more vulnerable during their attacks. This is just one example of how the environment is weaponized by states to debilitate populations already in crisis.
While the UN General Assembly acknowledged in 2018 that climate change is a major contributor to migration, “climate refugee” is still not an official status. Without refugee status, individuals cannot seek asylum abroad, are waitlisted for medical care and social services, and are not protected as stateless people by their receiving countries. Additionally, the acknowledgement of climate refugees would signal that “wealthier countries, which are most responsible for planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, [have a] global responsibility to help those harmed by climate change,” according Mia Prange of CFR. With the rates of climate migration growing, the international community is currently unprepared for the rise in refugees they will have to take in and will likely need more lenient refugee policies that encompass victims of climate change to support them.
In 1950, the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) was organized, and in 1951, the Refugee Convention defined a refugee as, “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” This definition is still the framework for defining refugees today, and while its broad outlook on refugees makes it adaptable to many different conflicts and circumstances, its stagnant definition has prevented it from adapting to modern issues like climate change. Since migrants moving as a result of natural disasters and climate change are not facing direct persecution by another group of people, they are not covered in all cases in the way that they would be if they were their own designated group.
In 2008, the Brookings Institution identified five categories of migrants who have to move for climate and natural disasters: hydro-meteorological disasters, situations of environmental degradation, sinking of small island states, zones too dangerous for human habitation, and climate change induced. In many instances, the initial reason for migration is to look for economic advantages abroad, but when things get drastic and a sudden hurricane or fire wipes out a region destroying homes and livelihoods, the move is more urgent. While economic migrants have protection, climate refugees do not have the designations protecting them when disaster strikes.
Without climate refugees being a defined status, individuals do not get the protections that legal refugees do. These can range from resettlement documentation and health care to case work and recreational activities. The most significant of these protections is non-refoulement in Article 33 of Refugee Convention, which gives everyone the right to seek asylum and protects asylum seekers from being turned away or sent back to their country of origin at international borders. This is important because, even before a person receives their official refugee status and the process of resettlement, they are protected by international governments and supported in their journey to liberty. Therefore, the concern advocates of climate refugees have is that, without protection and a legal category by the international community, climate migrants will be deported back to their homes of origin, which may be demolished, in famine or drought, and uninhabitable, as in the case of Ioane Teitiota. He is a citizen and resident of Kiribati, a small island nation in the Pacific threatened to “sink” as result of rising tides. In 2015, he sought asylum in New Zealand but was denied because there was no imminent threat to his life, as scientists still predict a few decades before sea levels rise to the point of island consumption. This resulted in him being sent back to Kiribati where he appealed to the UN Covenant on Civil Liberties.
So what’s stopping the international community from stepping up and protecting climate refugees? One argument is that expected migration as a result of land loss and degradation is not severe enough for it to pose a threat to life or well-being, as was the conclusion of the court in Teitota’s appeal. Yet, even though they upheld the New Zealand decision, the UN ruling was critical for how climate refugee status is discussed. They acknowledge that in countries like Kiribati, life threatening effects of climate change are likely and that climate refugee status must be determined on a case by case basis. They also affirmed that slow on-set effects, like sea level rise and long term drought, can be just as deadly as quick on-set effects, like wildfire and cyclone decimation.
In this case, the UN court used judicial activism to push the international community towards official climate refugee status but failed once again to legalize it. The true reason for the polarization of this debate is the responsibility of colonization that would fall on Western countries, and the economic burden they would have to bear. Research from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research shows the countries that will be hit hardest by temperature increases are those nearer the equator. The propensity for drought, soil degradation, monsoon level storms, heat waves, and wildfires are all projected to “reach 560 a year – or 1.5 each day, statistically speaking – by 2030,” according to the UN in 2022. And the states carrying the brunt of this burden are those in the global south, where these events occur more frequently. Additionally, equatorial developing countries are substantially more vulnerable, which leads to “long-term economic disadvantages,” whereas developed countries closer to the poles “tend to show no significant vulnerability.” When rich, colonizer nations block climate refugee status and modern migrant protections from passing on the global level, they are protecting themselves from the backlash of the inequalities they created, and they will not atone for their errors until it is too late.
One cannot discuss the global response to climate change without talking about reparations, and this would be just one way that wealthy countries can make amends. At COP28 in Dubai last year, two dozen countries committed to a “loss and damages” fund that would distribute wealth from countries responsible for the creation of global warming, to countries suffering the impacts. While this is a monumental step towards adapting to climate change on a state by state basis, COP and the UN still need to support individuals on the frontlines of natural disasters. Adaptation can only take the world so far when major action to stimmy the burning of fossil fuels has failed time and again. Eventually, people, often the economically disadvantaged from underdeveloped countries, will be forced to move, and when they do, states have to be ready to take them. Waiting for the day when a flood of people land on a country’s doorstep looking for aid to make a decision, is neither constructive nor sustainable.
And the day has already come. In March, Cyclone Freddy hit southern Africa, killing more than five hundred people and displacing hundreds of thousands of people across Malawi, Madagascar, and Mozambique, leading to record breaking internal and external migration. Migration as a result of climate change is not just the future, but the present, and until governments put aside their prides and end the debate on refugee status, people will not be safe to move where they need to protect themselves and their families against the rising water levels, increased temperatures, and extreme weather. In decades to come, inaction during the case of climate refugee status is the same as inaction during a human rights crisis. Definitions in the law are important - they define who has rights and who doesn't, who is secure and who isn’t. This is just one definition that could make a world of good if the international community took up the mantle and protected migrants.