Climate Refugees: A Case for Protection

Climate change has both direct and indirect impacts on territory, and hence on individuals. Extreme events such as floods and storms made more frequent by climate change can spoil portions of land and deprive its inhabitants of resources usually connected to residency in it. Climate change will provoke enlarging desertification, thereby making inhabitable, or less rich in resources, previously fertile lands. Due to climate change, the area of diffusion of typically tropical diseases will spread, and this may make more difficult human living in certain areas. Increased prices of food, connected to droughts, or difficulties in cultivation connected to alteration in ecosystems, can cause abandonment of certain previously cultivated areas. Finally, in some cases climate change has effects which can cause the disappearance of whole countries, as it is likely to happen when sea levels rising will cause the submersion of some archipelagos in the Pacific.⁠ In this paper I shall focus on disappearing countries, i.e. on the countries whose territory will be entirely destroyed by submersion. In particular, I am going to consider the following claims: Climate refugees – People forcefully displaced from disappearing countries (from now onwards, climate refugees) have a right to compensation. Territorial rights of climate refugees – In particular, climate refugees suffer violations of their territorial rights; hence, compensation for them should mainly take the form of the restoration of their rights to a territory, through relocation. My main purpose here will be to claim that adaptation to some of the most harming effects of present and future climate change involves admittance of climate refugees, and that international law should make room for this new category. I shall also claim that two criteria should be balanced in order to frame a climate-refugee international regime – i.e. to assign climate refugees to host states. First, big historical emitters (understood in terms of their per capita emissions in the past century) should admit more than small emitters; second, refugees should be given admittance in the country most similar to their lost motherland. I shall claim that these two criteria are a sound applications of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. The paper develops as follows. In § 1, I shall defend the view that people fleeing from disappearing countries may be considered proper refugees, in light of the 1952 Convention. In § 2 and 3, I shall present arguments in favour of my view of the climate-refugees international regime. § 4 concludes.