The world is already living beyond its safe limits, and the consequences are no longer abstract. Global temperatures have risen by about 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, a shift that may appear modest but is already displacing people from their land, livelihoods, and homes. This is why climate injustice can no longer be treated as a future risk or a technical debate; it has become a lived reality demanding legal recognition and protection.
There is no alternative planet waiting in reserve. Earth remains humanity’s only habitable home, yet its capacity to sustain life equitably is being steadily eroded. Those who have contributed least to global warming are often the first to be forced out by floods, droughts, and rising seas. When people are pushed from their communities not by war or persecution but by an environment that can no longer sustain them, the absence of legal protection becomes a failure of justice, not just policy.
As Joyeeta Gupta, professor of environment and development and co-chair of the Earth Commission, has argued in research published in Nature, 1°C should be understood as a justice boundary, not merely a scientific threshold. Beyond this point, climate impacts begin to violate the basic rights of more than one per cent of the world’s population, roughly 100 million people. The moral case for a climate refugees act flows directly from this reality: warming at today’s levels is already forcing displacement, while international law still treats those displaced as if they do not exist.
“Climate change does not announce itself with a single cause. It creeps in through repeated floods, failing rains, advancing deserts, and rising seas until staying becomes impossible.”
When the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, governments committed to limiting warming to “well below” 2°C, later recognising 1.5°C as a safer target. For many vulnerable countries, especially small island states, even this was a painful compromise. As Gupta has noted, two degrees was never survivable for them. Yet current global emissions trajectories still point towards far higher warming by the end of the century.
One of the most visible consequences of this failure is displacement. Climate change does not announce itself with a single cause. It creeps in through repeated floods, failing rains, advancing deserts, and rising seas until staying becomes impossible.
In Nigeria, thousands of farmers have been displaced by recurrent flooding along the Niger and Benue river basins. In 2022 alone, floods submerged vast stretches of farmland, destroyed homes, and forced families into temporary camps, not because of war or insecurity, but because the land could no longer support life.
Similar stories are unfolding in Bangladesh, where rising seas contaminate freshwater and push rural households inland, and across the Pacific, where entire communities face the slow disappearance of their ancestral land.
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Yet under international law, these people are not recognised as refugees.
The 1951 Refugee Convention protects those fleeing persecution, conflict, or violence. It does not protect those forced to move because crops no longer grow, water is no longer drinkable, or floods return year after year. This legal gap leaves millions in a grey zone: displaced, vulnerable, and largely invisible.
Some regional and soft-law frameworks have begun to acknowledge this reality. Africa’s Kampala Convention, adopted in 2009, recognises displacement caused by natural disasters and climate-related events within national borders, while the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has issued guidance urging states to protect people displaced by climate impacts through planned relocation, temporary protection, and human rights law.
These instruments stop short of creating a formal category of “climate refugees”, but they signal a growing recognition that climate-driven displacement is no longer theoretical.
Gupta explains climate displacement as a process, not a sudden event. First comes adaptation: farmers change crops, households dig deeper wells, and communities raise homes above flood lines. When adaptation fails, people begin to absorb losses: land, income, security. Only when survival itself becomes impossible does displacement occur.
“Moving is expensive, dangerous, and often unwanted,” she said. Most climate displacement today happens within countries or regions, not across continents. People leave only when they have no choice.
One of the reasons international laws have struggled to respond is causation. How can we prove that someone moved because of climate change rather than poor governance or market failure? This is where attribution science becomes crucial.
Advances in climate science now allow researchers to link specific extreme events, rainfall patterns, and heat stress to human-induced climate change with increasing confidence.
As this science matures, the legal excuse for inaction weakens.
The difficulty is compounded by the fragmented nature of international law. Environmental treaties, human rights conventions, trade rules, and investment agreements often operate in isolation (silos).
States can commit to climate targets while denying responsibility for the human harm that follows. This fragmentation has long allowed governments to discuss climate change in technical terms – parts per million, temperature pathways – without confronting its human cost.
That is beginning to change.
In a landmark advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice clarified that climate obligations cannot be assessed in isolation. Governments, the court stated, must interpret climate commitments alongside human rights and environmental law. Climate harm is not just an environmental issue; it is a matter of human dignity and survival.
This shift matters. It opens the door to recognising climate displacement as a rights issue rather than a humanitarian afterthought.
A Climate Refugees Act, whether at the international or regional level, would not create chaos or mass migration. It would do something far more modest and necessary: acknowledge reality. It would recognise that people displaced by climate impacts deserve legal protection, planned relocation pathways, and support grounded in justice rather than charity.
Climate change is already visible to the blind and audible to the deaf. Fields lie underwater. Wells run dry. Villages empty quietly, without headlines or gunfire. The absence of legal recognition does not stop displacement; it only deepens suffering.
The question is no longer whether climate displacement exists. It is whether the law will continue to look away.
Until climate refugees are recognised, climate justice will remain incomplete, and the world will continue to ask the most vulnerable to pay the highest price for a crisis they did not create.
