"Climate refugees" is a popular but legally contested label for people forced to leave their homes because of climate-driven hazards such as sea-level rise, desertification, prolonged drought, cyclones, or flooding. The term does not appear in the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, which define a refugee narrowly as a person with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. Because environmental harm is not "persecution" in that sense, UNHCR and most legal scholars prefer "persons displaced in the context of disasters and climate change" or, when borders are not crossed, internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Most climate-related displacement is in fact internal. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) regularly reports that weather-related disasters trigger tens of millions of new internal displacements each year, concentrated in South and East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and small island developing states.
Key normative instruments and processes include:
- The Nansen Initiative (2012–2015), a state-led process that produced the Agenda for the Protection of Cross-Border Disaster-Displaced Persons, succeeded by the Platform on Disaster Displacement.
- The Global Compact on Refugees and Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, both adopted in 2018, which acknowledge climate, environmental degradation, and disasters as drivers of movement.
- The Kampala Convention (2009), the African Union treaty on IDPs, which explicitly covers displacement caused by natural or human-made disasters.
A landmark moment came in 2020 when the UN Human Rights Committee, in Teitiota v. New Zealand, found that states may not return individuals to countries where climate-change impacts threaten the right to life, even though the specific claim by the Kiribati national failed on the facts. The decision opened a narrow but real pathway for non-refoulement claims tied to climate harms. Pacific states, Bangladesh, and the Sahel are frequently cited as frontline jurisdictions.
Example
In 2014, New Zealand declined Ioane Teitiota's asylum claim from Kiribati based on sea-level rise; the UN Human Rights Committee ruled on the case in 2020, signaling that climate harms can in principle trigger non-refoulement obligations.
Frequently asked questions
No. The 1951 Refugee Convention does not cover displacement caused by environmental or climate factors alone, and UNHCR generally avoids the term, preferring 'persons displaced in the context of disasters and climate change.'
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