The World Must Recognize Climate Refugees

The Indigenous iTaukei people have called Fiji home for thousands of years. But now, one of their villages, Vunidogoloa—on the coast of the country’s second-largest island, Vanua Levu—sits abandoned. In 2014, the 150 or so residents of Vunidogoloa moved to a new site known as Kenani, roughly 1 mile inland.

“Today, we launch the first project in Fiji to save an entire village from the rise in sea levels caused by climate change,” then-Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama declared. “It is real. It is happening now.”

The Fijian government has so far earmarked more than 40 villages for potential resettlement due to sea-level rise and coastal erosion. Since 1993, satellite data has shown Fiji’s sea-level rise to be approximately a quarter of an inch each year, threatening many of the country’s low-lying islands.

Vunidogoloa’s story is a microcosm of a broader global climate migration crisis. Climate scientists predict that similar relocations—planned or not—will become more frequent as the planet gets warmer. Other Pacific island communities, including those in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, are especially at risk of accelerating sea-level rise, coastal flooding, and coastal erosion. So are many nations in the Caribbean, such as the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago.

Yet despite growing numbers of climate-displaced people, very few countries offer them specific protections. When they moved 10 years ago, the residents of Vunidogoloa did not enjoy any such legal protections; instead, their relocation began as a community-led effort. But in 2018, the Fijian government released its Planned Relocation Guidelines, granting other at-risk communities the right to move, too.

The document officially acknowledged planned relocation as a component of Fiji’s climate adaptation strategy. It was followed by the Climate Change Act 2021, a law that creates a comprehensive legal framework for addressing the impacts of climate change. One of the main objectives stated in the legislation is to “provide for the relocation of at-risk communities and safeguard their rights.”

While more vulnerable countries such as Fiji recognize the need to address this crisis, most internal—and all international—climate migrants lack specific legal protections.

And the problem is only growing. Some research forecasts that more than 1 billion people—roughly an eighth of the world’s population—could be at risk of displacement by 2050, largely due to natural disasters and climate change.

In 1990, the first report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the United Nations body that regularly assesses the latest climate science—asserted that “[t]he gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration.” But climate migrants do not qualify for protections under international law. Despite its warning more than three decades ago, the U.N. does not recognize the term “climate refugee.”

The 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention protected the rights of displaced persons in the wake of World War II. In the more than seven decades since, the term refugee has been used to refer only to those who can demonstrate that they have a “well-founded fear” of persecution in their home countries due to one of five “protected grounds”: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

Today, however, people are not only fleeing repressive regimes and religious persecution, but also more frequent and extreme weather events. The adverse effects of climate change and natural disasters fall disproportionately on marginalized groups.

In recent years, the number of people displaced by natural disasters—which may not always be climate-related—has totaled in the tens of millions. In 2022 alone, the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reported that natural disasters triggered a record nearly 33 million displacements.

The current scope of the term “refugee” is insufficient to address the large number of people who will be displaced by the global climate crisis, leaving them without legal protection or access to asylum. A new global humanitarian immigration pathway that recognizes the unique challenges that climate-displaced individuals face—such as a lack of legal status and insufficient resources for resettlement—would facilitate the development of domestic and international policy frameworks that protect and assist this growing population. This new category would not need to alter the existing 1951 Refugee Convention.

As in Fiji, most climate migration currently occurs internally, rendering the affected internally displaced people (IDPs). The World Bank’s widely cited 2021 Groundswell report predicts that climate change could force 216 million people to migrate within their home countries by 2050. These IDPs include a combined 105 million from Africa, 49 million from East Asia, and 17 million from Latin America, considered one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions.

Recent years have also seen major wildfires in Europe, drought in Africa and the Middle East, and rising sea levels in coastal areas of Asia and the Pacific. And nearly everywhere has experienced extreme heat: 2023 was the hottest year on record, with global temperatures averaging 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit above 20th-century averages, and 2024 is on track to top that. In the coming decades, extreme heat is likely to be one of the climate threats that make certain regions increasingly uninhabitable.

But unlike in Fiji, where the residents of Vunidogoloa received funds from the government and international organizations to build new infrastructure at the relocation site, many other at-risk communities worldwide do not have access to the same type of support.

The international community must reach a consensus on how to legally address climate-displaced individuals—and establish formalized ways to protect them.

One way to protect cross-border climate migrants is to reform international refugee law. In the seven decades since the 1951 convention entered into force, it has been updated only once: A 1967 protocol removed geographical and temporal restrictions on the convention, giving it universal applicability. Previously, the convention applied only to people who became refugees due to events in Europe prior to 1951.

Creating a new convention or protocol that establishes climate change as a legitimate reason for protection would be challenging. Any new document would be subject to political pressures within and between state parties, and governments may be reluctant to assume new international obligations. It is also possible that some countries would use the opportunity to renegotiate the current treaty to weaken or dilute standards.

However, if climate change were to be recognized as a legitimate ground for protection through a new humanitarian immigration pathway, it could both protect border-crossing climate migrants and compel states to adopt specific policies and practices to support climate IDPs.

In the absence of a global agreement on climate migration, states must act unilaterally, adapting their immigration laws to better accommodate people displaced by climate events.

In the United States, for example, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security could make better use of temporary protected status (TPS) to protect individuals displaced by climate-related disasters, and particularly slow-onset events such as desertification.

TPS was created by the Immigration Act of 1990, and it allows certain migrants to temporarily live and work in the country for a period of up to 18 months, which the U.S. government can renew indefinitely. It provides humanitarian relief to citizens whose countries are suffering from environmental disasters, protracted unrest, or conflict, including Ukraine, Haiti, and Yemen.

But TPS would not provide sufficient permanent protection to climate-displaced people. TPS designations apply to entire countries rather than individuals, so there’s no guarantee that certain climate migrants would receive the protections they seek. And the program’s temporality is more likely to put migrants in a legal limbo, too, as its designations can be terminated.

A more permanent option for the U.S. Congress would be to pass the Climate Displaced Persons Act, which would offer a humanitarian visa for people displaced by climate related events. The legislation—initially introduced in 2019—was reintroduced last year by two Democrats, Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez and Sen. Ed Markey. It has not moved forward since then.

Some progress has already been made internationally. In 2018, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, commonly known as the Global Compact for Migration. It was the first international framework to recognize climate change as a driving factor of migration.

A total of 164 signatories—excluding the United States—agreed to develop solutions for migrants “compelled to leave their countries of origin owing to slow-onset natural disasters, the adverse effects of climate change, and environmental degradation.” Such solutions include establishing “planned relocation and visa options” when adaptation or repatriation are not possible. (The compact was adopted while U.S. President-elect Donald Trump was in office during his first term; outgoing President Joe Biden later announced U.S. support in 2021.)

But for all its good intentions, the U.N. compact is not legally binding. Greater success may be found at the regional level.

To date, Africa is the only region to have a binding legal instrument that incorporates a broader refugee definition than that put forward by the U.N. The Organization of African Unity’s 1969 Refugee Convention widens the scope of the 1951 refugee definition to protect those fleeing events that are widespread and indiscriminate, including “external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order.”

Latin America’s 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees is a similar, though nonbinding, framework. It considers a refugee to be a person fleeing “generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances.”

The definition of a refugee in these two cases is broad enough that severe climate-related events could be considered sufficient reason for migrants to qualify for international protection. Such frameworks could be readily replicated and adapted elsewhere.

IDPs fleeing climate change have even fewer protection options, depending on their country. At best, they have protections under the U.N. Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, a set of 30 standards that identifies key rights and guarantees to protect people against displacement. It also describes IDPs as fleeing “natural or man-made disasters.” But while the principles are widely recognized as the international standard for internal displacement, they are not legally binding.

There is also the Platform on Disaster Displacement, a state-led initiative that aims to improve how countries respond to and prepare for climate-induced displacement. However, because migration is often multicausal, it can be difficult to isolate climate factors from others that may drive migration, such as conflict and violence.

While there is increasing global resolve to address climate change, many countries lack the political appetite or incentive to establish explicit protections for climate-displaced migrants, whether they remain within their home country or cross an international border.

The Fijian government’s efforts to protect its population from the threat of climate change should not be a one-off case, but rather a model for other countries to follow.