Beyond «Climate Refugees»: Rethinking International Protection for Environmentally Displaced Persons

Abstract

Climate change and environmental degradation are increasingly recognized as major drivers of human mobility, operating through both sudden-onset disasters and slow-onset processes such as sea-level rise, desertification and resource scarcity. Although estimates vary widely, projections suggest that millions of people may become displaced by 2050 because of climate change, predominantly within their own countries but also across international borders. This article examines the emerging phenomenon of “environmental migration” against the backdrop of international refugee law and broader human rights frameworks. It first maps the diverse environmental scenarios that trigger displacement before analyzing the existing international legal landscape. Particular attention is paid to the contested terminology surrounding “climate refugees”, “environmental migrants” and “environmentally displaced persons” and to the protection gaps that arise from current categorizations. This article argues that, while existing norms on human rights, disaster risk reduction and internal displacement offer partial safeguards, they do not provide coherent legal status or systematic protection for people displaced across borders by climate-related harms. It concludes that climate-related displacement should be addressed through a combination of evolving human rights-based climate litigation, enhanced use of existing instruments and the progressive elaboration of specific normative frameworks.

1. Introduction

Climate change and environmental degradation will undoubtedly become one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century, and they have already been acknowledged by the European Union as a catalyst for migration and other sources of instability such as conflicts, food insecurity and population displacement (2019 European Green Deal initiative, for example [1]).

Climate change impacts may take the form of sudden-onset events (such as flooding, droughts and extreme weather) as well as slow-onset events (such as desertification, coastal erosion, sea-level rise and non-climate related events and processes such as earthquakes and volcanic activity). The IOM has warned that in many cases these processes are closely interlinked with human-induced changes in the global climate system [2].

Amongst the main factors driving climate migration are extreme weather events, environmental degradation such as sea-level rise and the scarcity of resources such as drinking water. According to the Foreign Relations Council [3], climate change (extreme weather events, rising sea levels and shifting temperature patterns) is disrupting global food and water security. Without preventative measures, critical issues will arise in rural, urban and coastal areas and will drive an increase in climate migration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that sea levels will rise between 15 and 25 cm by 2050, and in the long term, flooding will lead to soil erosion, amplifying the risk of poverty and disrupting economies.

In this scenario, many people from vulnerable regions will become internally displaced, while others will seek to cross international borders. A large arrival of migrants across borders presents challenges for host regions, or more specifically, to their services and infrastructure. This can lead to conflict over scarce resources (such as those that may have prompted the initial displacement), which has led experts to identify climate migration as a major geopolitical risk [4].

Experts have underlined the growing influence of climate change as a driver for human mobility. Geographical context, local conditions and institutional incentives affect the impact of climate change, which has often been described as a threat multiplier in the sense that it can both displace people and intensify other factors related to economic instability, resource scarcity and human security that trigger human migration and the creation of refugees [5]. Climate displacement thus emerges as a planetary health crisis, profoundly and unequally affecting the most vulnerable communities. Its consequences are logistical and legal, but they are also health-related: displaced populations face the disruption of food and water security, loss of shelter, rupture of community bonds and psychological trauma. These are not peripheral concerns but the very substance of what makes environmental displacement a humanitarian emergency.

According to the recent statistics published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, over 376 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced by floods, windstorms, earthquakes or droughts since 2008; since 2020, there has been an annual increase in the total number of people displaced due to disaster compared with the previous decade of 41% on average. The World Bank has come up with a figure of 216 million people who will be internally displaced by 2050 due to slow-onset climate breakdown impacts, and The Institute for Economics and Peace predicts that in the worst-case scenario, 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 due to natural disasters and other ecological threats [1].

The prospect of a global climate migration crisis raises challenging questions regarding international refugee law and human rights, since there is no single legal framework for protecting those displaced across national borders for climate-related reasons. To deal with this question, a body of legal scholarship has grown around the designation of “cli-mate refugee status” under international law, debating whether existing legal frameworks can adequately respond to the challenges ahead.

2. The Difficulty Reaching an Agreement on Terminology: Environmental “Refugees”, “Migrants” or “Displaced Persons”

Although the term “environmental refugee” had already appeared in some discussions during the 1970s [6], it was not until a decade later that it gained wider recognition thanks to the publication of Essam El-Hinnawi’s policy paper in 1985 and Jacobson’s report in 1988. El-Hinnawi, a UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) researcher, defined environmental refugees as “those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life” [7] Specifically, he identified three subcategories of environmental refugees: (a) those who have been temporarily displaced due to a temporary environmental disruption, such as an earthquake, and will return to their habitat once it is rehabilitated to its original state; (b) those who have been permanently displaced and resettled in a new area because of permanent changes, such as the creation of dams or man-made lakes, that make their return impossible; and (c) those who either temporarily or permanently migrate within their own country or abroad because of a progressive degradation in the resource base that prevents them from meeting their basic needs. Jacobson further consolidated this terminology and sought to operationalize El-Hannawi’s definition by producing one of the first and most cited estimates of the number of existing environmental refugees at the time (10 million). Most importantly, however, he also noted anthropogenic processes as an exacerbating factor in “unnatural disasters” [8] and suggested the potential for climate change to generate future flows of environmental refugees [9].

From then on, the term entered public discourse and the broader links between environmental change and migration began to be studied in greater depth. However, even though there has been an increasing social and political recognition that climate change is driving both national and international human mobility, there is no consensus on how to describe those affected. Instead, various terms such as “climate refugees”, “climate migrants”, “environmental refugees”, “environmental migrants”, “climate-induced migrants”, “environmentally displaced persons”, “victims of environmental harm” or “forced climate migrants” are often used interchangeably, even in scientific reports and official documents produced by governments or international institutions [10]. All these terms refer, in broad terms, to individuals or groups whose livelihoods are threatened by climate change or by specific environmental disruptions, but the lack of conceptual clarity [10] about which term constitutes the most accurate or appropriate definition hinders the recognition and protection of the humanitarian needs and human rights of the people that are displaced.

This debate is not merely semantic: the choice of terminology carries its own distinctive political and legal implications and affects which international legal frameworks are applicable, how responsibility is framed, what kind of legal obligations are triggered for states and which degree of support, protection and long-term solutions the affected individuals will receive. Reflecting on this complexity, Lulić (2023) [10] argues that there are at least two relevant distinctions that should be taken into consideration when choosing an appropriate term: first, whether persons in need of protection should be conceptualized as forced migrants, refugees or displaced persons; and second, whether the decided term is intended to cover only cross-border movement or also displacement within a person’s own country.

2.1. Environmental “Refugees”

The starting point for this debate is the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was formulated in the specific context of post-war Europe and later expanded upon by the 1967 Protocol, which removed its original geographical and temporal limitations. These conventions constitute the core international legal framework for refugee protection [11], and they are clearly focused on the protection of people fleeing violence, persecution and political targeting. Grounded in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which recognizes the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries, Article 1.A (2) of the Convention defines “refugee” as a person who, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

Two elements are thus decisive for climate-related mobility. First, recognition of refugee status under the Convention is, strictly speaking, reliant on crossing an internationally recognized border. Restricting a possible definition of “environmental refugees” to those who cross international borders would thus understate the extent of the problem, as it would ignore those who become displaced within their own country’s territory (the vast majority of those affected by climate change [1]). Second, the Convention requires persecution attributable to human actors. Environmental phenomena or climate processes, however harmful, cannot in themselves constitute persecution [5].

Some scholars argue in favor of expanding the definition of refugee, noting that although climate change is not the primary cause for the emergence of armed conflicts, it may operate as a secondary cause by aggravating factors such as resource scarcity, hunger, drought, flooding, sea-level rise and human displacement [8]. Others contend that, although climate change impacts can act as a risk multiplier and intensify threats of persecution or violence, these are “spatially and socially differentiated” factors and should not be conflated [12].

It follows that people fleeing natural disasters, slow-onset environmental degradation or climate-related economic crises are excluded from the scope of the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol. While individuals displaced by the effects of climate change might not meet the strict criteria of “refugee” under these instruments, some regional frameworks adopt broader definitions of the term. In particular, two instruments are often cited: the 1969 Organization of African Unity (OAU) Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees.

The 1969 OAU Convention extends the term “refugee” to include any person who:

“Owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part of the whole of his country of origin or nationality is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality”.

Similarly, in the Inter-American context, the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees sought to expand the concept of refugees provided by the UN Refugee Conventions to address challenges specific to the region. It established that “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circum-stances which have seriously disturbed public order” should also be considered refugees.

Although the Cartagena Declaration does not directly address environmental migration, some scholars argue that environmental disruptions and disasters related to climate change could be considered “circumstances that have seriously disturbed the public order” [12]. It must be noted, however, that this is a non-binding instrument and that neither it nor the OAU Convention expressly cover displacement caused solely by environmental degradation or climate change.

On this basis, it can be concluded that populations displaced by the impacts of climate change or environmental disruptions generally do not fall within existing legal definitions of “refugees” and thus are not systematically protected by the legal regime, including the principle of non-refoulement. Against this backdrop, two main options have been advanced. One is the creation of a new, dedicated international treaty for the protection of people displaced in the context of climate change (or, alternatively, the adoption of a specific protocol on climate-related displacement within the UNFCCC framework). Another is to reinterpret and expand aspects of existing refugee law so that some climate-displaced persons could qualify under a broader, human rights-based understanding of persecution and non-refoulement. Proponents of this latter approach argue, for instance, that severe environmental degradation combined with state inaction, discrimination or other forms of structural neglect can amount to persecution and thereby justify extending refugee protection to at least a subset of climate-related cases.

Given these doctrinal and political sensitivities, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other UN agencies and international organizations have deliberately avoided the terms environmental or climate “refugees” so as not to blur the established legal category of refugees and risk weakening protection for those who clearly fall under the classic definition. There is also concern that broadening the refugee definition to include environmental stressors in addition to political persecution would ultimately dilute the effectiveness of institutional protection mechanisms as well as erode state and public willingness to support existing refugees.

2.2. Environmental “Migrants”

In this context, international organizations have increasingly favored the language of “migration”. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), which became an organization related to the UN in 2016, introduced into the UN system the following widely cited definition of “environmental migrants”:

“Persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad” [13].

Under this broad definition, “climate-induced migration” encompasses movements that are temporary or permanent, voluntary or forced, internal or cross-border [10]. This conceptual choice is also not without criticism. Many scholars contend that “migration” implies a degree of volition [11] and thus fails to adequately capture the forced nature of displacement caused by climate change. In response, the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) has proposed a distinction between “forced environmental migrants” (people who have to leave their place of normal residence due to environmental stressors) and “environmentally motivated migrants” (who may decide to move in response to such stressors but are not strictly compelled to do so [14]). Such distinctions aim to reintroduce the element of compulsion that is central to protection debates.

However, if affected people are categorized as “migrants” rather than “refugees”, they will not benefit from refugee-specific guarantees (including the principle of non-refoulement), and their protection primarily depends on general human rights law and domestic immigration policies.

2.3. Environmentally “Displaced”

Alongside “migrants”, scholars and some international bodies also employ the more neutral category of “environmentally displaced persons” to denote those “who are displaced from, or who feel obliged to leave, their usual place of residence because their lives, livelihoods or welfare have been placed at serious risk as a result of adverse environmental, ecological or climatic processes and events” [15]. This terminology foregrounds the fact of displacement and associated protection needs while avoiding the specific legal connotations of the Refugee Conventions and the suggestion of voluntariness often associated with “migration”. It is therefore often regarded as more compatible with a human rights-based approach that focuses on vulnerability and humanitarian needs.

The debate over terminology also has a clear spatial dimension. In the current regime, most climate refugees could be conceptualized as “internally displaced persons” [16] (IDPs), a notion used to describe:

“Persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border” [17].

Therefore, IDPs affected by climate-related disasters or slow-onset environmental degradation fall outside the scope of international refugee law but may be covered by the 1998 UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and, in some cases, by domestic legislation. The Guiding Principles state that the national authorities have the primary duty of providing protection and humanitarian assistance and, even so, the concept of “environmentally internally displaced person” serves only “as a descriptive term, not as a status that confers obligations on States” [16].

In sum, people who move across borders in the context of climate change currently find themselves in a significant protection gap: they are neither clearly covered by the existing international refugee regime, nor is there a dedicated legally binding framework specifically addressing transboundary climate-related displacement. The Council of Europe has suggested creating a global guiding framework for the protection of transboundary displaced persons because of climate change and natural disasters, modeled after these principles, such as was done to draft the Kampala Convention for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons in Africa [1].

Having studied the current debate and given the legal and political consequences of the selected terminology, this article adopts “environmentally displaced persons” as its preferred term for three reasons. First, it clarifies its involuntary character (“displacement”, unlike “migration”, connotates compulsion rather than choice, which is closer to the reality faced by people forced to leave their degraded or uninhabitable environments). Second, it avoids the legally contested and politically charged nature of employing the term “refugee”, without denying the possibility of extending protection under the 1951 Convention in appropriate cases. Thirdly, it is broad enough to encompass both internal and cross-border displacement, which is essential for any framework that aspires to address the full scale of the challenge that arises. This term is therefore adopted throughout this article as the most accurate designation for the purposes of this argument. Beyond these legal considerations, this terminology also resonates with a planetary health understanding of displacement as a symptom of systemic ecological breakdown rather than an isolated migration event. Framing those displaced as “persons” rather than “migrants” reflects the interconnection between human health and the integrity of planetary systems upon which sustainable livelihoods depend [18].

3. Mapping the Current Legal Landscape

With the increasing effects of climate change turning it into one of the most relevant topics of current policy discussions, much has been said about the legal gap in which environmentally displaced people find themselves. While the international legal frameworks specific to refugee protection are not applicable, other international law instruments are considered by some to be either too weak or too general to offer an adequate solution to the problem. However, others argue that there are many legal instruments that are relevant to the situation, given that international, regional and domestic laws have evolved to such a degree that almost no situation can be considered entirely regulated [19], and it is easy to see that the international legal system has a large number of potentially applicable relevant norms (for example, human rights law, disaster law, environmental law, soft law, etc.). Additionally, legal instruments are drafted in a manner that allows for their evolutive interpretation to cover situations unpredicted at the time of their creation.

KÄLIN & SCHREPFER (2012) [15] identified a series of existing international laws and regulations that are relevant to the situation at hand and categorized them into three groups depending on the obligations they generate for states: (i) mitigation rules, designed to slow and eventually stop climate change and its consequences; (ii) adaptation rules, to adjust to the threats caused by the effects of climate change; and (iii) protection-related rules, which require safeguarding the rights and addressing the humanitarian needs of those affected by the negative effects of climate change.

Mitigation-related rules are created to address the causes of climate change and therefore have an important preventative effect on displacement and other forms of population movements [15] by aiming to eliminate or reduce the need of affected groups to leave their habitual places of residence. They do, however, present limitations, since the obligations they generate often being unmet, and they do not directly address compensation guarantees or individual rights not to be displaced.

The most important examples of mitigation frameworks are the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which imposes on its parties the general obligation to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change; and its consequent agreements, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which instructs Annex I states to reduce their emission levels and reach legally binding targets) and the 2015 Paris Agreement (which states that the parties shall aim to undertake rapid reductions by pursuing domestic mitigation measures and allows states to set their own reduction targets and improve them every five years).

The UNFCCC echoes the idea of shared responsibility for climate change, stating that its adverse effects are a “common concern of humankind”. Although it did not originally consider climate-displaced individuals, more recent agreements such as the Paris Agreement recognize that parties should “respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights when taking action to address climate change, including the rights of migrants”. However, there are no binding penalties to ensure the achievement of the goals of the Paris Agreement, making it insufficient on its own to protect climate refugees [20].

KENT & BEHRMAN (2018) [19] also consider that other international instruments, although more vague, could be understood to establish obligations to adopt mitigation measures. They cite the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants as an example, which focuses almost entirely on the protection of migrants and refugees and states the states’ obligation to respect their human rights and fundamental freedoms under international law. Although it does not specifically add new references about the protection of environmental migrants, it does consider the need to address the driving factors behind human displacement including climate change and environmental degradation (its parties commit to addressing the drivers that create or exacerbate large movements, including combating environmental degradation and ensuring effective responses to natural disasters and the adverse impacts of climate change). This Declaration is also relevant because of the documents that emanate from it: the Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

Going beyond mitigation rules, adaptation-related rules address the effects of climate change by aiming to reduce the risks and vulnerabilities it generates. States have the primary responsibility for their disaster risk reduction and adaptation measures, and it has been suggested to include them in climate change strategies [15]. When discussing regulations related to climate change adaptation, the following instruments are worth noting: the 2015 Nansen Initiative’s Agenda for Protection, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 and the 2015 UNHCR Guidelines on Planned Relocation.

The Nansen Agenda is a non-binding instrument that resulted from a three-year state-led consultative process which aimed to reach a consensus among signing states to implement a protection agenda for people externally displaced by climate-related events with standards of treatment [1]. It can be classified as soft law, a compilation of guidelines for states to follow, that includes certain references to the protection of environmentally displaced persons, with particular emphasis on “preparedness” (mapping populations at risk, planning possible scenarios and reviewing domestic laws) and the identification of areas “suitable for evacuation if planned relocation proves necessary” (acknowledging that return will not always be possible and calling on states to provide residency or resettlement options). It proposes recommendations concerning the rights of environmental migrants to cross borders and to be granted temporary admission to stay in host states or even receive refugee status when the conditions causing displacement persist for an extended period of time or become permanent.

In this line, the 2015 UNHCR Protecting People from Disasters and Environmental Change through Planned Relocation guidelines, however, sets out a series of principles that states must respect regarding the protection, funding and attention to community-specific needs in cases of planned relocation of populations from soon-to-be uninhabitable areas. Mainly, states not only have the responsibility to prevent and reduce disaster risk and ensure sufficient funds for planned relocation, but they must also consider communities’ specific circumstances and needs in the process of relocation, respecting the dignity and human rights of the people affected.

Similarly, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2015 as a continuation of its predecessor (the 2005 Hyogo Framework for Action) and will stay in place until 2030. It includes a series of principles stipulating that states have the primary responsibility to prevent and reduce disaster risk (implying a soft law obligation to adopt mitigating and adaptive measures [19]) and lists several, although vague, key priorities (understanding and investing in disaster risk governance and enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response).

Lastly, on the basis that mitigation and ex ante adaptation measures are insufficient to protect those negatively affected by climate change, states are bound by protection-related rules that aim to protect the human rights of environmentally displaced individuals [15]. The general international human rights legal framework has been extensively reviewed in the context of environmental migration, due to its wide and universal protection of individuals regardless of nationality or the willingness of states to protect them [19].

Some authors argue that international human rights law is limited in the context of environmentally displaced people by the fact that it does not regulate their admission or continued stay in a foreign territory, since border control and migration policies remain under states’ sovereignty [15]. Additionally, it should be considered that it is also limited by the fact that it requires the threat to human rights to be direct and imminent (which is important to take into consideration when the negative effects of climate change are often slow and take years to materialize [19]) and also because it is necessary to establish a clear and direct link between the victims and those responsible for the violations of their human rights (often impossible to prove in the context of the effects of climate change and its causation of climate migration). Other authors argue that it is correct to resort to human rights instruments, since they guarantee fundamental rights such as the right to life, health, dignity, physical integrity and adequate living conditions, which all become affected when the effects of climate change force people to abandon their habitual places of residence. Most importantly, the UN has recognized that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right related to other rights and existing international law [21].

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees also guarantee the right to seek asylum but, as it has been previously discussed in this article, the restrictive definition of what constitutes a “refugee” makes the international legal frameworks adopted for their protection not applicable to the cases of individuals displaced by environmental or climate-related factors. Current international refugee law is geared towards the protection of non-national and stateless refugees from civil or political persecution within their home countries, criteria that environmental migrants do not fulfill since (i) they may not have crossed the borders of their countries of origin, becoming instead displaced within their national territory, and (ii) they are not escaping from persecution by human actors but environmental disruptions, and they would have to prove on a case-by-case basis the causality nexus between the respective impact of climate change in each individual case and the action or inaction of states and other main polluters, which is virtually impossible [15]. The right to asylum and the principle of non-refoulement (which protects refugees from being returned to their countries only as long as the fear of persecution exists) remain unavailable to environmental migrants displaced because of the consequences of climate change. This resolution can be understood as a legal articulation of planetary health principles, recognizing that human health is inseparable from ecosystem health and linking environmental degradation directly to health outcomes [22]. From this perspective, the resolution provides a foundation for understanding displacement not merely as a consequence of environmental change but as a failure to protect the fundamental right to a healthy environment that duty bearers must address [23].

Thus, whilst taking into account how complicated it would be in the current international context to adopt a legally binding instrument for the protection of environmental migrants, it proves necessary to find a solution that can effectively protect the human rights of those affected. Climate litigation about human rights issues related to the environment has arisen as a possible short-term solution.

4. Human Rights-Based Climate Litigation as an Emerging Response

Considering the legal gaps outlined in the previous section, scholars and policymakers must increasingly look to human rights-based climate litigation as a pragmatic solution to reaffirm fundamental rights in the context of climate change, to extend legal protection to environmentally displaced people within the existing international regime and to shape future environmental policy by pressuring governments to enhance regulatory standards and pushing corporations to adopt sustainable practices [24].

Courts and regulatory agencies are important actors in legal innovation [25]. An expanding approach to climate litigation [26] uses fundamental human rights (such as the rights to life, health and a safe environment) to challenge inadequate climate action (mainly, corporate and governmental responsibility for environmental degradation or unmet emission targets) by linking environmental harm with concrete violations of individual and collective rights. Between 1986 and 2024, the total number of cases filed worldwide reached 2.967, having increased considerably over the past two decades [26]. There is an interesting diversity of cases, especially amongst countries particularly affected by the damage of climate change, that can serve as inspiration for the adoption of potential global actions to expand the protection of environmental migrants. In the early stages of climate litigation, cases mainly targeted corporations for environmental degradation and sought damages or injunctive relief, but over time they expected state accountability for climate inaction to be included [24]. As such, there is a growing number of “strategic litigation cases” [26], through which the plaintiffs seek not only to win their individual cases but also to influence public debate and change the behaviors of a targeted group of actors in relation to climate action.

Climate litigation in both the Global North and South demonstrates how existing obligations can be interpreted in light of climate science and equity concerns, sometimes ordering more ambiguous mitigation or adaptation measures that directly affect populations at risk of displacement. Studies have found that in high-income countries, courts are more receptive to cases that align with existing national or international environmental obligations, whereas in lower-income countries cases often highlight broader human rights implications and the disproportionate burden of climate change on vulnerable communities [24].

It must be noted that the climate litigation cases most frequently cited originate predominantly in the Global North, with the theoretical frameworks underlying much of the literature similarly drawing from European and North American legal scholarship. However, the growing body of jurisprudence from the Global South is beginning to offer not only empirical evidence of displacement but also substantive legal contributions of its own. Courts in the Global South have articulated the relationship between environmental degradation and human rights in ways that enrich and challenge the Global North’s frameworks. The analysis of climate litigation should not treat Global South jurisprudence as peripheral, therefore reproducing the structural inequalities that characterize the climate crisis itself, but should instead engage with these cases as equal sources of legal reasoning, in dialogue with the growing literature on climate justice and decolonial approaches to international law.

Landmark cases such as Urgenda Foundation v. Netherlands (2019) or Friends of the Irish Environment v. Ireland (2020), and more recent ones such as DUH v. Germany (2025), target governments for their failure to meet climate change obligations. The first was the first tort climate case successfully taken against a government on the grounds of human rights violations: the Dutch government was required to set new emissions reduction targets after the Dutch Supreme Court found the state to have endangered its own citizens by failing to meet the minimum carbon-emission reduction goals, applying Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights (right to life and right to respect for private and family life) [1]. Other landmark cases, such as Milieudefensie et al. v. Royal Dutch Shell (2021) and Lliuya v. RWE (2025) target corporations and set important precedents for corporate accountability when plaintiffs can demonstrate a clear causal nexus between emissions and climate harm. These cases reveal certain limitations: while courts can mandate governments to comply with their international obligations by taking certain actions, the enforcement of these rulings continues to be challenging; and when they rule on a case deciding corporate accountability, especially in transboundary pollution cases, they must respect the legal doctrine of proportional responsibility [24].

For environmental migrants, this litigation approach based on human rights legislation does not yet provide a comprehensive legal status, but it opens new pathways to contest refoulement, demand preventative measures and frame displacement as an issue of climate justice rather than mere humanitarian need. There are some relevant cases that prove how human rights frameworks have the potential to protect environmental migrants, such as the case Budayeva and others v. Russia (2008) when the European Court of Human Rights held that the states’ duty to protect the right to life extended to the adoption of preventative measures for protection from natural disasters. The case Teitiota v. Chief Executive Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment of New Zealand (2015) represented an essential breakthrough when discussing the international legal protections for environmental refugees. Facing deportation to Kiribati, Teitiota and his family applied for asylum to remain in New Zealand under refugee status by arguing that the effects of climate change on their country of origin were forcing its citizens to leave their islands. While the Supreme Court ultimately determined that they could not qualify as refugees under the provision of Article 1 (A) (2) of the Refugee Convention because there was no evidence that their life would be in jeopardy because of the environmental conditions in Kiribati, it did note that their decision should not be interpreted as ruling out the possibility of recognizing that “environmental degradation resulting from climate change or other natural disasters could create a pathway into the Refugee Convention or protected person jurisdiction” in a more appropriate case.

Emerging jurisprudence from the Global South offers particularly compelling examples of how courts are beginning to articulate the inseparability of ecological and human well-being, the foundational insight of planetary health [27]. Colombian and Pakistani courts have used constitutional and human rights frameworks to address environmental harm in ways that directly embody planetary health principles, recognizing that ecosystem degradation and human health outcomes are interconnected dimensions of a unified crisis [28].

Other notable cases have proven more successful in proving that climate inaction can indeed constitute a violation of fundamental human rights. Such is the case with Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan (2018), in which the Lahore High Court explicitly linked climate adaptation to the right to life; or Future Generations v. Ministry of the Environment and Others (2018), in which the Colombian Supreme Court recognized that the fundamental rights of life, health, the minimum subsistence, freedom and human dignity are substantially linked and determined by the environment and the ecosystem and even recognized the Colombian Amazon as a “subject of rights” entitled to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration. More recently, the Colombian Constitutional Court recognized the connection between climate change and forced displacement in the case José Noé Mendoza Bohórquerez et al. v. Department of Arauca et al. (2021). It found that there is a legal vacuum when it comes to the special protection of people forcibly displaced because of environmental and climate-induced causes, but nevertheless environmental authorities must guarantee victims’ rights and provide the necessary protection in accordance with constitutional and international standards on forced migration.

These examples from Colombia and Pakistan represent innovative legal reasoning that responds to the specific vulnerabilities of communities in the Global South. The Colombian court’s recognition of the Amazon as a subject of rights, alongside with the constitutional link between climate change and forced displaced, and the Pakistani court’s integration of climate adaptation into the right to life, demonstrate that affected communities and their legal systems are active contributors to the development of international norms. A decolonial approach to climate litigation that includes Global South jurisprudence not merely as evidence of a universal problem but a contributor to normative innovation has the potential to substantially enrich the international legal framework for the protection of environmentally displaced people.

It is therefore possible to conclude that climate litigation based on an approach centered on human rights has emerged as a crucial, even if slow and resource-intensive, response to the regulatory void surrounding environmentally displaced persons. Landmark judgments against both states and corporations have expanded the boundaries of accountability, creating important precedents and opening new avenues to demand preventative and protective action. However, the uneven enforceability of court decisions, the inconsistencies across national jurisdictions and the lack of a specific status for environmental migrants underscores the limits of litigation as a substitute for a comprehensive protection framework. Human rights-based climate litigation should therefore be seen as a temporal solution that can inform the development of future hard and soft law frameworks specifically tailored to climate-induced displacement.

5. Conclusions

Environmental conditions have always shaped the patterns of human mobility, but the increasingly serious effects of climate change will continue to do so at an unprecedented scale. Although estimates of future human displacement vary due to the difficulty of proving migration as a consequence of climate change, current projections of the displacement of millions of people in the coming decades underscore that environmental displacement will become a structural international challenge during the 21st century. And yet, as it has been shown in this article, people who are forced to leave their places of residence due to environmental degradation and climate change impacts are largely invisible within the existing international legal provisions and therefore fall into a substantial legal gap that leaves them vulnerable and unprotected in the face of a growing threat.

Current international refugee law centers on transboundary flight from civil or political persecution by human actors, circumstances in which climate migrants cannot be considered to be found. Suggestions to expand the interpretation of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol to cover “environmental refugees” face both doctrinal and political resistance, while regional frameworks such as the 1969 OAU Convention and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration would only indirectly protect them if a broad interpretation of them is accepted. International efforts to frame the affected people as “environmental migrants” or “environmentally displaced persons” have improved conceptual clarity but have not led to the formulation of binding protection treaties or agreements comparable to those that protect refugees.

However, climate-related displacement can be addressed indirectly through various mitigation-, adaptation- and protection-related rules (ranging from international treaties such as UNFCCC and soft law instruments such as the 2016 New York Declaration to general human rights law). These instruments, alongside evolving jurisprudence thanks to human rights-based climate litigation, have pushed national and international courts to recognize that environmental degradation alongside inadequate climate action can amount to violations of fundamental rights such as life, health and dignity. Landmark decisions have begun to articulate states’ duties to protect populations at risk, including those who may become displaced. Although enforcement remains uneven and outcomes vary across jurisdictions, this emerging strategy of climate litigation offers new pathways for the protection of environmental migrants.

Nonetheless, litigation is a partial, slow and resource-intensive solution that cannot substitute for a coherent, comprehensive international protection framework. The persistent difficulty of proving causality, the predominance of internal displacement and the political sensitivities surrounding any reform of the refugee regime further complicate efforts to secure robust, predictable protection. Ultimately, the challenge resides in getting the international community to confront deep choices about responsibility, solidarity and the fair distribution of the burdens of climate harm. Consequently, this article suggests that the way forward lies in a multi-layered approach through which strategic climate litigation can, in the short term, partially fill the legal gap while informing the gradual elaboration of specific hard and soft law norms better tailored to the current and future reality of environmental mobility.

It follows that the path forward requires not just a reform of existing instruments but a more fundamental rethinking of the normative architecture governing climate-related displacement. Academic scholars and international bodies have suggested a number of proposals ranging from the creation of a protocol dedicated to the UNFCCC specifically addressing climate displacement, modeled after the Nansen Initiative but including binding obligations, to the adoption of a new UN Convention specifically protecting environmentally displaced persons. Others have called for the creation of enhanced solidarity mechanisms such as resettlement programs or granting temporary protection status, regional protection initiatives modeled after the 2009 Kampala Convention, or the systematic integration of climate displacement protection into existing international human rights monitoring bodies. Each of these approaches faces significant political and legal obstacles, and there is as of yet no clear consensus in the literature on which path is most viable. It is clear, however, that the current fragmentation of applicable norms is insufficient to meet the scale of the challenge ahead, and while strategic climate litigation is a useful tool that can partially fill the legal gap by informing the gradual elaboration of specific hard and soft law norms, it cannot substitute for a coherent and binding international framework that is better tailored to the current and future reality of environmental mobility.

This article argues that this normative framework must be grounded in not only legal innovation but also the principles of planetary health. From a planetary health perspective, the protection gap this article has documented is not merely a legal deficiency but a planetary health emergency requiring urgent interdisciplinary response. The innovative jurisprudence emerging from the Global South, grounded in the recognition that human rights and ecosystem health are inseparable, points toward the normative direction this article advocates: a framework in which the health of displaced populations and the planetary systems upon which their well-being depends serves as the central organizing principle of protection [28]. Planetary health frameworks demand interdependency, equity, transformation, and the health of both people and ecosystems as the governing standard.

The building blocks for such a framework are present in existing legal instruments and emerging jurisprudence; what is required is a sustained commitment to let planetary health become the lens through which climate displacement is understood, analyzed, and addressed.