Eleanor Meehan explores why climate migrants are at extreme risk from global warming and why they are falling through the gaps of international asylum law.
According to forecasts from the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), up to 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050, due to the effects of climate change. Still, the term ‘climate refugee’ itself has no legal standing internationally. Why this strange discrepancy exists between the displacement of vulnerable people, and the response of organisations such as the United Nations refugee agency or the International Organisation on Migration, is more complex than first assumed.
The term ‘climate refugee’ has been in use since 1985, when the UN Environment Programme expert Essam El-Hinnawi defined it as people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat due to sizable environmental disruption or conflict attributed to resource scarcity. Examples fitting this definition in the modern day are unfortunately very easy to come by. From those in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, travelling across the border into Mexico after devastating hurricanes, to deadly floods in Libya and Pakistan, this form of displacement is most certainly on the rise.

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