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This document discusses environmental causes of migration, specifically those related to climate change. It notes that climate change is expected to force around 200 million people to migrate by 2050, both directly through rising sea levels and extreme weather, and indirectly by reducing crop yields and spreading disease. While terms like "environmental refugee" and "climate refugee" have been used to describe these migrants, they have no official legal definition. The UN's 1951 Refugee Convention definition, requiring persecution in one's home country, means climate migrants cannot be recognized as refugees under international law. This lack of legal recognition leaves them more vulnerable without the rights and protections granted to refugees.

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64 views2 pages

Legal/51993245.1 1 of 2

This document discusses environmental causes of migration, specifically those related to climate change. It notes that climate change is expected to force around 200 million people to migrate by 2050, both directly through rising sea levels and extreme weather, and indirectly by reducing crop yields and spreading disease. While terms like "environmental refugee" and "climate refugee" have been used to describe these migrants, they have no official legal definition. The UN's 1951 Refugee Convention definition, requiring persecution in one's home country, means climate migrants cannot be recognized as refugees under international law. This lack of legal recognition leaves them more vulnerable without the rights and protections granted to refugees.

Uploaded by

altmash
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Migration, which leads to a migrant crisis, is a situation where persons of a

particular area are compelled to move to other places as a consequence of


different factors, the most popular being ‘persecution’. According to the World
Migration Report 2020, the current global estimated migrants were 272 billion till
2019, which equates/represents 3.5% of the World’s population. However, this
paper deals with the environmental factors of migration (to be precise ‘climate
change’).

However, this research paper expresses environmental causes of migration,


especially Climate Change associated causes, and provides/discusses the legal
analysis of those affiliated factors/causes.
As per the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change
is one of the primary reasons for human migration and it is estimated that around
200 million people will be forced to migrate as a consequence of climate change
by 2050. Climate change facilitates migration directly as well as indirectly. Direct
consequences being rise in sea level, coastal erosion while reduction of available
water, decreases in crop yields, negative overall impacts on health are some of the
indirect repercussions of climate change.
Directly associated outcomes are rise in sea level, extreme weather events, coastal
erosion and flooding, etc., whereas contamination of water, destruction of crops,
and spread/outbreak of water and vector-borne diseases are Indirect repercussions
of Climate Change.
Terms such as ‘Environmental Refugees’ and ‘Climate Refugees’ used to refer
these migrants.

There are various terms to address these migrants such as environmental refugees,
climate refugees, environmentally displaced persons, and forced climate migrants,
etc. Although these terms are not legally or officially defined, but various scholars
and international organistations have analysed and tried to define these terms.
Firstly, Essam El Hinnawi has given one of the most prominent definitions of the
term ‘Environmental Refugee’ i.e. “Environmental Refugees are those people

Legal\51993245.1 1 of 2
Claim No: F16YM661 Initials of Witnesses:

who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or


permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or
triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the
quality of their life” in 1985. Since then, these terms have been referred at various
reports and research to illuminate the suffering of such migrants.

Due to the compressed and skinny definition of the term ‘Refugee’ in


International laws, the utmost pitfall with the climate refugees is that
internationally they haven’t been recognized as a ‘Refugees’. The term ‘Refugee’
has been defined in ‘1951 convention on refugees’ as ‘those who have a well-
founded fear of being persecuted on grounds related to race, religion, nationality
or membership of a particular social group or political opinion, and are unable or
unwilling, owing to fear of persecution, to seek protection from their home
countries are labelled as ‘Refugees’. Pursuant to this definition, in order to get the
status of ‘Refugee’, a climate migrant needs to be persecuted in their own country
which is rare.

It is evident from the above definition that environmentally displaced persons


don’t fall under the purview of the term ‘Refugee’ of the 1951 convention and its
protocols even though the one-tenth population of countries like Kiribati has
migrated due to environmental conditions in the last decades. The repercussions
of such deprivation are that they are not entitled to rights and protections which
are guaranteed to the refugee that further makes their situation more vulnerable.

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