It is clear today that climate change is having and will increasingly have an impact on human mobility, both at the internal and international level. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) data, for instance, since 2009 a person per second has been displaced because of a natural disaster, with an average of 22.5 million people displaced by climate or weather-related events since 2008.1
Not surprisingly, these figures raise significant concerns about how the international community should deal with similar migration patterns. Moreover, it is worth recalling that the very first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, dating back to 1990, already highlighted that the single greatest consequence of global warming would precisely be on human mobility.
This book analyzes the topic of climate change-forced migrants (commonly referred to as “climate refugees”) through the lens of public international law. The general aim is to understand the extent to which this branch of law can deal with one of the key global public policy questions of our age. Alas, climate science clearly shows that notwithstanding international mitigation efforts, global warming will keep increasing in the next decades. As a side effect, more and more people will be either induced or forced to leave their homes or countries, and this poses significant challenges to the international community and its laws, which are stuck between the twofold obligation to protect inalienable human rights and the need to preserve state sovereignty and national identity.
Dedicated legal studies have proliferated over the last years, and research has clearly demonstrated that international law is currently not up to the task of protecting people forced to migrate due to climate change. This is basically because of the relative historical novelty and complexity of the latter: neither refugee law nor complementary protection mechanisms, both of which are essentially post-Holocaust legal frameworks, are currently applicable to “climate refugees” and this simply because climate and environmental degradations are not held as factors that can activate international protection mechanisms.
Truly speaking, the inapplicability of existing international protection systems also depends on the lack of a legally coherent conceptualization of the category of persons involved, who are commonly simplistically labeled as “climate refugees”. The first objective of this book is thus to conceptualize this category in a manner that is relevant to international protection standards. As known, a legal definition of the category is for the time being still missing; on top, what remains unclear is how and why it should be considered as legally autonomous. This book builds on Sumudu Atapattu’s definition of “forced climate migrants”, understanding them as individuals compelled to leave their national state because its territory has (or is about to) become uninhabitable due to climate change-driven environmental degradations. By so doing, the book focuses on forced climate-related cross-border migrations that are characterized by a very limited chance of migrants returning to their countries of origin. In this sense, the 2018 Global Compact for Migration, while recognizing that adaptation is a priority, also points out that in some cases the possibility to return to the country of origin might not be possible for migrants, leading to the necessity to provide migration pathways or international protection standards for the affected individuals.
The consequent objective of this book is then to explain the reasons why “forced climate migrants” should be granted international protection. To substantiate this argument, the analysis focuses on climate change international law, and human rights law, pointing out the legal principles and rules upon which an international obligation to protect persons forced to migrate due to climate change is currently emerging under international law. Relying on instruments protecting human rights universally or regionally, this book advocates a legal obligation of states to protect forced climate migrants when origin countries have become extremely fragile (if not collapsed altogether) because of anthropogenic global warming. In this respect, for example, insular micro-states such as Kiribati or Tuvalu (sometimes referred to as “drowning” or “sinking” states) are the most affected ones. Science suggests that they will be “deterritorialized” by rising sea levels, generating a clear problem of governance of their populations, which will be compelled to leave their countries. Should these people not be protected by the international community and under international law if their state is to disappear because of “man-made” climate change?
Turning to the future, the book investigates the legal elements on which a “forced climate migrants’ law” can be built. In this respect, it is possible to draw on the universal regulatory systems for the protection of human rights and on international climate change law. Considering these and referring also to the rules of international law in matters of responsibility, the book argues that within the international legal system a duty to provide some form of assistance to forced climate migrants in a third state is currently arising. The seeds of this are already in place: the progress made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as well as intergovernmental initiatives such as the Nansen Initiative and the Platform on Disaster Displacement, and the adoption in 2018 of the Global Compacts for Refugees and Migrations go in this direction. At the same time, there is place for already existing legislation to be interpreted progressively by competent courts: some national cases and the possible evolution of the European Convention on Human Rights, for example, leave room for the reinterpretation of “forced climate migrants” as part of the larger group of individuals who can benefit from complementary protection frameworks. As some have pointed out, this is in fact very slow progress if we recall that the IPCC warned already thirty years ago that the greatest impact of climate change would be on human migration.2 However, it is clear that the law, especially at the international level, somehow evolves “like a pachyderm” because of its very nature, which always requires a minimum and common degree of coordination and agreement among states.
Our analysis starts with Chapter 2, which contextualizes the phenomenon of climate change-related migrations and illustrates the conceptual framework underpinning the book. After it, the work is composed of three different parts.
Part I reviews the most important findings concerning the link between climate change and migration to provide the reader with a sound analytical framework. The debate concerning climate-forced or induced migrations has been ongoing for decades now, and literature on the topic has proliferated over the years, also fueling a fair degree of confusion. In this sense, we are going to refer in this book to a symbolic “climate refugees cauldron”: an intricate and confused set composed of all those who are directly or indirectly induced or forced to migrate because of climate change, be it within their national country or abroad. Part I aims at shedding some light in this cauldron, and proposes a conceptualization of the category of those who are forced ...