27 February 2024 – by Ilana Cohen
Studies indicate that there could be up to 1.2 billion people forcibly on the move due to climate change mid-century. Although most displaced people will move within the borders of their own countries, becoming internally displaced persons (IDPs), or regionally to neighboring countries, many people will also be forced to cross borders in search of security and opportunities unavailable in their home countries, where their governments lack the capacity to respond adequately to climate disasters or climate change effects are so extreme that they simply make areas uninhabitable. Despite this increasingly prevalent reality and its global implications, there remains a vast gap in international law around protecting persons displaced by climate change who are forced to cross borders. Crucially, human rights frameworks can present a viable pathway for extending the scope of legal protection afforded to these climate refugees.
The below report will propose a rights-based approach for addressing the legal protection gap, which takes as its point of departure the understanding that there is no way to address climate refugeehood without recognizing the underlying human rights at play. It adopts an environmental justice perspective with respect to the common but differentiated responsibilities of Global North and South governments to take measures to implement this approach.
The central findings of the report are presented through and further discussed in light of a unique table illustrating the connections between climate change-induced displacement and violations of human rights demarcated in international and regional agreements, along with an analysis of past and ongoing legal cases centered around such connections, which draws from the Earth Refuge Legal Database.
