In recent years, an increasing number of people are fleeing from their home countries where they face risks arising from the impacts of climate change. These people are often referred to as “climate migrants”.
However, the problem is that current laws and agreements about migrants and refugees offer few, if any, special protection to those forced to move because of climate conditions.
Domestically, no nation’s immigration system currently has environmental criteria for admission.
International law also provides no clear mechanism to address and assist climate migration. The U.N.’s 1951 Refugee Convention establishes the obligations and responsibilities its member nations have to refugees. Article 1(A)(2) of the Refugee Convention requires that a refugee has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” in their homelands. It defines refugees as people who are forced to flee their country of origin due to fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. This definition does not include climate change and thus does not offer climate migrants any protection.
Whilst some international agreements and rulings do mention the impacts of natural disasters and environmental degradation, they are not legally binding. For example, in 2015, Teitiota and his family who were all native islanders from Kiribati applied for asylum in New Zealand, on the basis that their homeland had become uninhabitable as a result of pollution and rising sea levels. New Zealand government rejected the application and deported them. Teitiota lodged a complaint with the U.N. Human Rights Committee. In January 2021, in its first ruling regarding someone seeking asylum because of climate change, the Committee said that in the future, countries “may not deport individuals who face climate change-induced conditions that violate the right to life.” However, the rulings of the Committee are not internationally binding.
What does this all mean? It means that when people are displaced and forced to move due to environmental disaster or degradation, they are not refugees and are subject to the immigration laws of their destination countries. Yet since these immigration laws also lack environmental criteria for processing and protecting these migrants, climate migrants often are left with nowhere to go.
Inevitably, climate change will increasingly become the driver of displacement. Countries worldwide need to rethink the role of natural disasters and climate change in migration, as well as reform current international and national laws to recognize the rights of those displaced by environmental causes.