Climate migrants are not considered climate refugees in legal terms: should things change?
Climate change is threatening millions of lives across the globe. It has been elevating temperatures to unprecedented levels and triggering natural disasters such as storms and floods of much higher intensities. Rising sea levels have been inundating homes globally.
The brutal climate crisis is compelling scores of people to abandon their houses and flee to places that seem safe at the moment. This infamous phenomenon is called climate migration. It is a reality and rising at an exponential rate lately.
Environment not recognised as persecuting agent
There is no reliable estimate of the number of climate migrants on the planet today. The reason for this is the difficulty untangling the reasons for migration and a lack of official figures on internal country movement, according to experts.
The media and advocacy groups often refer to climate migrants as “climate refugees”. But these people are not legally considered refugees because the 1951 Refugee Convention does not recognise the environment as a persecuting agent.
Therefore, the nations the climate migrants escape into as asylum seekers are under no legal obligation to grant them entry, and many are forced to return to their country of origin, repeating the precarious existence in poor conditions under constant environmental threat.
Most of the time, regions that face environmental disturbances are also affected by serious conflicts, political instability, human rights abuses and poor economic development. These issues together cook up the perfect recipe for increasing migration levels.
Exclusion of climate refugees from refugee status
Climate migration is likely to increase even further in the coming years. Predictions from international thinktank Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) suggest that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050 due to climate change and natural disasters.
Several experts argue that the exclusion of climate refugees from refugee status is unjustified. The problem of the climate refugee is one of the foremost human crises of our times. But it has so far been treated as a peripheral concern. Things need to change soon.
