Why the 21st Century’s Biggest Migration Story Is Also a Justice Story

This article examines how climate change is reshaping global patterns of displacement and migration, and asks whether our current refugee and human-rights systems are fit for purpose. Drawing on recent data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), UNHCR, the World Bank’s Groundswell report, and legal developments such as the UN Human Rights Committee’s ruling in Teitiota v. New Zealand, it explains who “climate refugees” are (and are not), why most climate migration is internal, and how climate impacts intersect with conflict and poverty.

The article compares different legal protection regimes in a detailed table, reviews debates among scholars and critics, and proposes policy responses—from loss-and-damage finance and planned relocation to new mobility pathways—to ensure that people forced to move by floods, droughts, and sea-level rise are treated with dignity and fairness.

1. The Age of Climate Displacement

Climate change is no longer a distant threat; it is already pushing people from their homes every day.

• In 2023, there were 46.9 million new internal displacements, and 56% were triggered by disasters, most of them weather-related.
• In 2022, disasters caused a record 32.6 million internal displacements, 98% linked to weather-related hazards such as floods, storms, droughts and wildfires.
• Over the past decade, climate-related disasters have displaced about 250 million people, according to a recent UNHCR synthesis—roughly 70,000 people per day.

At the same time, overall forced displacement from all causes—war, persecution, disasters—has reached unprecedented levels: more than 122 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide by mid-2025. UNHCR notes that three-quarters of these displaced people live in countries heavily affected by climate change, and about half are in places hit by both violent conflict and serious climate hazards.

The World Bank’s landmark Groundswell modelling adds a sobering projection: without ambitious climate action and inclusive development, up to 216 million people in six regions could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 because of water stress, crop failures, and sea-level rise.

Some broader scenarios, synthesizing conflict, sea-level rise and extreme events, suggest that up to 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 under worst-case climate and fragility pathways.

In other words, climate change is not yet the only driver of displacement—but it is rapidly becoming a major force multiplier.

2. Who Counts as a “Climate Refugee”? Concepts and Misconceptions

The phrase “climate refugee” is powerful but legally imprecise. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, a refugee is someone who crosses an international border due to a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds such as race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. Environmental factors, by themselves, are not included.

2.1 What the Data Say

Several key facts help clarify the picture:

• Most people displaced by climate impacts are internally displaced persons (IDPs) who remain within their own country’s borders. IDMC data show around 9.8 million people living in internal displacement at the end of 2024 due to disasters, compared with 73.5 million displaced by conflict and violence.
• Disaster displacement is often short-term, but repeated events (for example, annual floods or chronic drought) can lead to protracted or permanent relocation.
• Climate impacts rarely act alone; they typically interact with conflict, poverty, governance failures, and land tenure issues. UNHCR’s report No Escape shows how extreme weather and conflict are deeply intertwined in countries like Somalia, Sudan and Syria.

UNHCR therefore prefers terms like “climate-related displacement” or “disaster-displaced persons”, emphasizing that climate change amplifies existing vulnerabilities rather than creating a wholly new, separate category.

For an accessible overview, see UNHCR’s “Climate change and displacement: myths and facts.”

3. Law, Borders, and a Landmark Case

Even if “climate refugee” is not a formal legal category, human rights law is slowly evolving.

3.1 The Teitiota Case: A Crack in the Wall

In the case of Ioane Teitiota, a man from Kiribati who sought asylum in New Zealand, domestic courts held that climate impacts did not meet the persecution requirement of the Refugee Convention.

However, when the case reached the UN Human Rights Committee, the Committee issued a historic view in 2020:

• Countries may not deport people if climate change-induced conditions in their home country would expose them to a violation of the right to life under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
• While Teitiota personally did not meet the threshold at that time, the Committee recognized that sea-level rise and environmental degradation can trigger non-refoulement obligations in the future.

Legal scholars describe this as the most authoritative human-rights articulation to date of how non-refoulement applies to climate risks, effectively nudging states toward recognizing some climate-displaced persons as rights holders, even if not “refugees” in the narrow sense.

3.2 A Patchwork of Protection

Outside such cases, protection for climate-displaced people relies on a patchwork:

• IDPs are covered by soft-law instruments such as the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and regional frameworks like the Kampala Convention in Africa.
• Cross-border disaster displaced people may receive temporary protection, humanitarian visas, or ad hoc admission, but these are not guaranteed.
• Initiatives like the Nansen Initiative’s Protection Agenda and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration encourage states to develop more predictable responses, but remain non-binding.

4. Types of Movement, Types of Protection

Table 1. Forms of Climate-Related Movement and Legal Protection

The table makes clear that there is no single “climate refugee” regime; instead, people navigate a complex mix of national, regional and international rules that were mostly designed for other types of crises.

5. Scholars, Researchers, and Critics: What Are They Arguing?

5.1 Caution Against Simplistic Labels

Many migration scholars warn against treating climate change as a single, dominant cause of movement:

• They argue that the term “climate refugee” risks oversimplifying multi-causal realities, where political marginalization, land grabs, and violent conflict often matter as much as rainfall or temperature.
• Over-emphasizing climate as a cause can encourage a securitized narrative—the idea of waves of climate migrants threatening rich countries—rather than a focus on rights and justice.

UNHCR itself focuses on “climate change as a threat multiplier”, stressing that most affected people remain close to home and that host countries are often themselves low-income, climate-vulnerable states such as Somalia, Sudan, Haiti, or Myanmar.

5.2 Climate Justice and Historical Responsibility

On the other side, climate-justice scholars and Global South advocates emphasize responsibility and capacity:

• High-emitting countries and corporations have contributed most to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is low-emitting, poorer countries whose people are forced to move.
• They argue for a robust “loss and damage” framework, where wealthier states provide dedicated funding for climate impacts—including displacement and relocation—beyond traditional mitigation and adaptation finance.

UNHCR’s recent reports highlight a stark mismatch: fragile states hosting climate-vulnerable displaced populations receive only a fraction of needed climate finance, even as disasters and conflicts intensify.

5.3 Rethinking Borders and the Right to Stay

A growing body of human-rights scholarship, building on Teitiota, asks:

• Should the right not to be displaced be recognized as part of the right to life, housing, food, culture?
• When land becomes uninhabitable, who decides whether communities move, and where they go?
• How can we respect collective identities and cultural ties to land, not just individual mobility rights?

These debates put borders and sovereignty under new ethical pressure: they were not designed for a world where entire territories might gradually disappear.

6. Policy Choices: From Emergency Response to Long-Term Responsibility

If climate-related displacement is both a humanitarian and a justice issue, what should governments and international institutions do?

6.1 Cut Emissions, Reduce the Need to Move

The most obvious—but politically hardest—answer is still rapid mitigation:

• The World Bank’s Groundswell modelling suggests that ambitious emissions cuts and inclusive development could reduce internal climate migration by up to 80% in some regions.

Without strong mitigation, every other policy is simply managing a growing problem.

6.2 Invest in Adaptation and Resilient Livelihoods

• Strengthen climate-resilient agriculture, water management and early-warning systems so communities can stay safely where they are as long as possible.
• Support urban planning and infrastructure in receiving cities, which will absorb most internal climate migrants.

6.3 Recognize and Plan for Internal Climate Migration

• Integrate climate migration into national adaptation plans and development strategies, using Groundswell-style hotspot mapping to anticipate where people are likely to move.
• Develop rights-based frameworks for planned relocation, including consultation, compensation, and long-term livelihood support.

6.4 Create Safer Cross-Border Pathways

Even if most climate migration is internal, some people will cross borders:

• States can adopt humanitarian visas, temporary protection, or labour mobility schemes specifically recognizing disaster and climate impacts.
• Regional organizations (e.g., African Union, Pacific Islands Forum) can negotiate free-movement or special protection arrangements for people moving from high-risk areas.

6.5 Scale Up Finance for Loss, Damage and Displacement

• Fully operationalize the UN Loss and Damage Fund with specific windows for displacement, relocation and host communities.
• Improve coordination between climate finance and humanitarian assistance, so countries hosting climate-vulnerable displaced people are not forced to choose between immediate lifesaving aid and long-term adaptation.

6.6 Put Rights and Participation at the Center

• Ensure that affected communities—pastoralists, small islanders, slum dwellers—are meaningfully represented in decisions about relocation, adaptation and finance.
• Strengthen legal assistance and access to justice so displaced people can claim their rights, not just receive charity.

7. Movement in a World of Sinking Ground

Climate change is not creating a completely new category of migrant, but it is tilting the entire playing field. It is pushing poor farmers off drying land, flooding cities where informal settlements already lack services, and slowly erasing the territory of small island states.

Border regimes and refugee law, built for an era of wars and revolutions, are creaking under the strain of a more gradual, planetary crisis. The law still hesitates to recognize “climate refugees,” yet human-rights bodies are beginning to acknowledge that non-refoulement can apply to climate-induced risks, and that the right to life includes protection from unliveable environmental conditions.

Ultimately, the question is not only how we label people, but how we share responsibility:

• Will the countries that contributed most to global warming accept climate-displaced people, fund adaptation and relocation, and treat these communities as partners rather than victims?
• Or will they invest mainly in tougher borders while those who did least to cause the problem are left with vanishing homelands and shrinking options?

The answer will determine whether the story of climate displacement becomes one of managed transition and solidarity, or of slow-motion injustice on a planetary scale.

Suggested Further Reading (APA-style, web accessible)

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. (2025). Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025 (GRID 2025). IDMC.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2023). Climate change and displacement: The myths and the facts. UNHCR.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2024). No escape: On the frontlines of climate change, conflict and forced displacement. UNHCR.

World Bank. (2021). Groundswell Part 2: Acting on internal climate migration. World Bank.

UN Human Rights Committee. (2020). Views adopted by the Committee under article 5 (4) of the Optional Protocol, concerning communication No. 2728/2016 (Ioane Teitiota v. New Zealand). CCPR/C/127/D/2728/2016.

Library of Parliament (Canada). (2024). The state of international refugee and human rights law in an era of climate change. Publication 2024-02E.