"Climate refugee" is a widely used but legally contested term. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol define a refugee as someone with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. Environmental or climatic harm is not among these grounds, so people displaced primarily by climate impacts generally do not qualify for refugee status under international law. UNHCR therefore prefers the terms persons displaced in the context of disasters and climate change or climate-displaced persons.
Most climate-related displacement is internal rather than cross-border. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reports tens of millions of new disaster-related internal displacements each year, the majority caused by weather-related hazards such as floods, storms, and droughts. These movements are governed by the 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and, in Africa, the 2009 Kampala Convention, which explicitly covers displacement caused by natural or human-made disasters.
Several frameworks address cross-border climate mobility without creating a new refugee category:
- The Nansen Initiative (2012–2015), led by Norway and Switzerland, produced the Protection Agenda endorsed by 109 states, and became the Platform on Disaster Displacement.
- The 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration explicitly references climate change, environmental degradation, and disasters as drivers of migration.
- The UN Human Rights Committee in Teitiota v. New Zealand (views adopted January 2020) held that returning individuals to countries where climate change threatens life could, in future cases, violate the ICCPR's right to life — a landmark but non-binding interpretation.
Small island states, particularly Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands, have pressed the issue in UN forums. In 2023 Australia and Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union treaty, offering a special mobility pathway for Tuvaluans, often described as the first bilateral climate-mobility agreement.
Delegates should use the term carefully, distinguishing legal status from political rhetoric.
Example
In 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee issued its views in Teitiota v. New Zealand, concerning a Kiribati national who argued that rising sea levels made his return unsafe.