Climate Refugees
What’s Happening
Ioane Teitota, a man from the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati, applied for refugee status in New Zealand in 2013.1 Teitota’s claim was exclusively based on environmental concerns; he maintained that coastal erosion and the rising sea levels in Kiribati, which sits less than two meters above sea level, posed a significant threat to his life.2 Had he been granted refugee status, he and his family would be the world’s first legally recognized climate refugees. However, his application and appeals were denied by New Zealand’s courts. The courts argued that the impacts of climate change do not entitle Teitota to refugee status under the 1951 United Nations Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.3 After a two-year legal battle in New Zeland, he was deported to Kiribati in 2015.4 Teitota then took his case to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), claiming that New Zealand violated Article 6 under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, namely, the right to life.5 In his reasoning, Teitota once again cited the sea-level rise in Kiribati, which caused the loss of habitable land and inhibited access to fresh water. Even though he was ultimately not granted refugee status, his case marked the first time that a UN agency recognized environmental hazards brought on by climate change as significant barriers to the implementation of human rights.6
Teitota’s case caught headlines around the world, however, he is only one of the millions of people who have been displaced due to climate-induced catastrophes in recent years. Notably, over the past decade, an average of 21.5 million people each year were internally displaced by environmental hazards.7 These hazards were either sudden-onset climate disasters or slowonset climate events.8 The former category refers to large-scale meteorological, hydrological, or geophysical disruptions, including hurricanes, mudflows, tsunamis, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions.9 Such disruptions often produce climate-related disasters by interacting with the affected community’s preexisting socioeconomic and infrastructural vulnerabilities, which determine the extent of its adaptive capacity.10 One example is the tropical Cyclone Idai that struck the southern coast of Mozambique in March 2019, causing 146,000 people to be internally displaced.11 The cyclone and the floods it triggered also destroyed nearly one million acres of crop — a major disruption given that agriculture is the main source of income for more than 70% of the country’s population.12 Overall, the disaster led to nearly $800 million in damages to infrastructure, whose effects continue to be felt to this day.13 In the coming decades, climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of sudden-onset disasters, such as Cyclone Idai.14
Despite garnering less international attention, slow-onset climate events will have a significantly larger impact on climate-induced displacement going forward. This is because they often take place over decades, and tend to reach irreparable levels by the time remedial action is taken. Highlighted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), these events include sea-level rise, increasing temperatures, salinization of fresh-water sources, glacial retreat, degradation of forests and agricultural land, loss of biodiversity, and desertification.15 In addition to posing environmental threats, these slow-onset events cause major systematic disruptions to the social and economic fabric of affected communities. Loss of income and food insecurity often lead to social instability, producing significant security and public health risks. Kiribati, for example, has the second highest child mortality rate among Pacific Island nations, related directly to the lack of fresh water.16 This has been compounded by climate change, with coastal erosions and sea-level rise further contaminating fresh water and soil on the island.17 Likewise, in the case in New Zealand, Teitota had maintained that environmental degradation created a tangible and substantial risk of harm if he were to return to Kiribati.18 Despite the denial of his application for refugee status, the health risks caused directly by sea-level rise was made evident when, upon returning to the island, one of Teitota’s children contracted blood poisoning due to the presence of bacteria in drinking water.19
The climate effects that unravel over time are expected to lead to a significant increase in the number of climate refugees in the coming decades. The World Bank predicts that slow-onset climate impacts could displace 143 million people by 2050 within the regions most vulnerable to these effects — sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.20 Unlike internal or crossborder migration caused by conflict or civil instability, climate-induced displacement also hinders the potential of refugees or asylum seekers to return to their home country.21 This means that, in the future, climate-induced displacement is likely to represent a total restructuring of global demographic dynamics, and thus should be prioritized and treated with significant concern by both regional and multilateral organizations, which has not been the case so far.
Why Is It Happening?
Despite these alarming projections, there are no international institutional frameworks to address climate-induced displacement, and the concept is not codified in international law.22 The Geneva Convention, which guides nearly all national immigration laws as well as international humanitarian law, adopts a narrow definition of “refugee.”23 Article 1 of the Convention specifies that to be considered a refugee, a person must demonstrate a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”24 As such, persons displaced due to environmental factors fail to fulfill this narrow criteria, and fall outside of the definition. The lack of institutional frameworks for climate-induced migration also extends to terminology, as even the phrase “climate refugee” is not officially adopted worldwide.25 Notably, the UNHCR maintains that the term is misleading and does not exist in international law.26 For this reason, the organization does not endorse the use of “climate refugee,” and instead, posits that it is preferable to use “persons displaced in the context of disasters and climate change.”27 In other words, states have no legal obligation to classify people fleeing environmental harm as refugees, and they have thus far chosen not to.
There are three leading causes for the lack of recognition granted to climate refugees under international legal frameworks and multilateral cooperation agreements: the absence of a “perpetrator,” current increased migration patterns, and the implications of climate migration for nation-states. Firstly, the matter of agency, or the lack of it, creates legal questions in regard to regulating climate migration. As codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, international law defines persecution as “the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights… by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity.”28 Likewise, the Geneva Convention considers that persecution, which applicants must face in order to be granted refugee status, “requires an element of human agency.”29 This means that although individuals can be harmed by climate change, they cannot be persecuted by it. This legal reasoning around persecution and human agency has been exemplified by New Zealand’s courts, including in the Teitota case. Although hearing cases about climate refugees since 1995, the country’s Immigration and Protection Tribunal did not rule in favor of any applicants to date.30 This was done on the grounds that the applicants do not meet the requirements for refugee status enumerated in Article 1 of the Geneva Convention, namely, that of being persecuted.31
Secondly, over the past decade, climate migration has mostly been a domestic phenomenon, with people displaced within national borders. The most prominent example of this is Bangladesh. The World Bank predicts that climate change will be the number one driver of migration in the country by 2050, which will increase the number of displacements to 13.3 million.32 In this way, although Bangladesh presents a worrisome case of climate migration, it does so largely within its own borders. As people in Bangladesh do not tend to seek cross-border migration for climate-related reasons, the issue remains one of domestic nature. Likewise, although the Pacific Islands produce vast numbers of climate migrants, they often seek entry either to Australia or New Zealand.33 Because displaced persons seek new places of residence either within their own nations or in neighboring countries, climate migration is, at the present moment, considered a national or regional issue. However, as anthropogenic influences continue to exacerbate hazardous environmental conditions, this perspective remains narrow-sighted. Given current emission projections, living conditions will deteriorate globally and parts of the world will increasingly become uninhabitable for human life.34 Around 200 million people are projected to live below sea level by 2100, and an additional 160 million people will be affected by intense flooding due to rising sea levels.35 As a result, the scale of climate-induced displacement will become far more extensive. Although climate migration remains a national or regional issue at the moment, in the coming decades, it has the potential to become a cross-border crisis.
Lastly, the reluctance to develop a multilateral framework to address climate refugees stems from isolationist national policies that have become more prominent in recent years. The United Kingdom, for example, left the European Union on an anti-immigration campaign platform, and former U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign was founded on the idea of “making America great again” by building a border wall with Mexico. The rise of xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiments in the West will likely hinder and limit refugee protections, rather than expand them to include climate refugees.36
What Is Being Done About It?
There have been a small number of multilateral arrangements that have attempted to address climate-induced migration, but they all remain underdeveloped. Examples include the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, adopted in 2018 by 164 countries, which called on countries to make plans to prevent the need for climate-caused relocation.37 Similarly, signatories of the 2015 Paris Agreement mandated the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change (WIM) with developing recommendations to address climate-induced displacement.38 The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by 193 countries, also contain several targets that can be reframed to protect climate migrants; target 10.7, for example, calls signatories to “facilitate orderly, safe, and responsible migration of people.”39 When it comes to concrete policy solutions, however, there are no binding multilateral conventions that govern climate migration. Even the most prominent frameworks for cooperation on climate change, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement, lack specific language, urgency, depth, and adequate provisions to tackle climate-induced displacement.40
Certain countries have also undertaken regional or bilateral initiatives aimed at addressing the growing climate migration crisis. The Kampala Convention, signed by the African Union in 2009, became the world’s first and only legally binding regional treaty on internal displacement.41 In addition to displacement caused by armed conflict, the Kampala Convention included natural disasters as a valid cause of displacement, and established a legal framework for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons.42 Article 5(4), for example, called upon nations to protect and assist people who have been internally displaced due to natural or human-made disasters, including climate change.43 This formal recognition of climate change as a migratory driver highlights an important step toward future measures in addressing the lacking protections of climate refugees.
Moreover, in 2011, Norway and Sweden established the Nansen Initiative, an intergovernmental partnership to protect people displaced across borders in the context of disasters, including due to the adverse effects of climate change.44 It synthesizes research and data on cross-border displacement and recommends policy mechanisms for reducing the vulnerability of displaced persons.45 The agenda was endorsed by 109 governments, signaling the Nansen Initiative’s success, and the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) was launched as its successor in 2016 by Germany and Bangladesh.46 However, the initiative did not call for a new binding international convention, and rather supported an approach to integrate effective practices into the normative frameworks of states.
What’s Next?
Despite the lack of wider multilateral action, there seems to be a consensus between state actors that the coming decades will witness an unprecedented increase in the number of climate disasters, both sudden and slow-onset in character, which will trigger internal and cross-border migration at never-before-seen levels. Extreme limitations to international action highlight the need for regional and national governments to be more proactive in mitigating the growing climate refugee crisis. For instance, Bangladesh has built migrant-friendly towns on the outskirts of major cities to accommodate large volumes of rural-to-urban migration.47 These migration towns serve as a good model for tackling internal climate-induced displacement, stressing the role that government intervention and good urban planning can have in the management of climate migration.
For countries that lack the capacity to implement domestic solutions, cross-border migration can be managed by leveraging existing regional organizations like the League of Arab States (LAS), the African Union (AU), or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) more effectively. This allows countries to engage in solutions directly applicable to the specificities of the region’s climate migration patterns without being held under a broad international framework.
However, more extensive multilateral commitments are needed to address climate migration. For a majority of the world’s nations, climate-induced catastrophes, such as the disappearance of habitable and arable land into the sea, are still treated as distant possibilities, neglected amidst more pressing challenges. In the absence of effective multilateral action on this front, the number of displaced persons seeking refugee status due to climate events will continue to overwhelm national migrant reception mechanisms, and lead to socioeconomic strains and security concerns, both domestically and internationally. A reception framework grounded in international legal principles to address climate refugees should be a priority for the international community going forward.
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