Legally speaking, there is no such thing as a “climate refugee.” While the phrase has often been used colloquially, international law does not offer refugee status to people displaced across borders by the impacts of climate change, and domestic laws have traditionally not considered climate or environmental factors as reasons to grant protection.

The vast majority of people moving in response to climate change do so within their own countries. But some will need to cross a border, either because doing so leads to the closest safe location or, in extreme cases such as small island countries contending with sea-level rise, because there is nowhere else to go.

Migration is a complex phenomenon and often is prompted by a range of factors. Due to the difficulty disentangling what the primary motivator is, as well as the lack of a legal category for climate-induced movement, it is unclear how many people migrate internationally because of climate change. It is likely, however, that a significant number move at least in part due to environmental factors, both slow-onset such as rising seas and desertification, which can contribute to economic hardship or conflict, as well as rapid-onset disasters such as cyclones, floods, and wildfires. Academic research has consistently found a link between climate pressures and international migration, and while individual migrants only rarely cite climate change as the sole or primary reason for their movement, which might instead center on economic opportunity or physical safety from conflict, it is often mentioned as one of many factors in their larger calculations.

However, people often have no means to move across borders legally solely because of their climate vulnerability. Some may receive protection for other reasons, while others may be able to utilize legal migration pathways such as work or family reunification channels, and others yet move without authorization. As the impacts of climate change intensify, resulting migration is sure to increase as well.

Policymakers and advocates have long grappled with this tension and have begun to experiment with solutions. Some pre-existing humanitarian policies have been stretched to accommodate disaster displacement, while policies particularly in the Pacific have more explicitly sought to carve out a pathway for people fleeing sea-level rise. Most notably, in 2025 Australia began issuing what have been described as the world’s first climate-specific visas to fewer than 300 people from the small island nation of Tuvalu. At the same time, international jurisprudence has begun to consider environmental threats as reasons why authorities might be unable to deport people back to their native country.

Combined, these developments point to a gradual evolution of some national migration systems and international protection norms to find accommodations for people whose homelands have become dangerous or uninhabitable because of climate change. The changes remain limited in scope and notably are unlikely to expand the longstanding legal definition for refugees. But they have created a legal lexicon for offering protection, either via national policy experiments or international legal philosophy.

This article, partly based on research conducted for the author’s book, Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration, provides an overview of international law concerning climate-affected migration.

Eligibility for Refugee Status Is Narrowly Defined

The current international protection system, which was forged in the wake of World War II, is silent on climate or environmental factors as reasons for countries to grant protection. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as a person fleeing persecution “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” Some subsequent regional conventions have expanded the definition slightly; for instance, the Organization of African Unity’s 1969 refugee convention also includes people fleeing “events seriously disturbing public order,” and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees, which has been signed by multiple Latin American countries, includes similar language. Yet none specifically mention climate change.

For one, climate change was not an issue on the minds of convention framers decades ago. Moreover, it is often difficult to isolate climate and environmental factors among the range of reasons why someone leaves their home. Climatic shifts affect people in nuanced, often indirect ways, which can operate differently in cases of fast-onset disasters and slower-onset changes. The dangers of a sudden-onset disaster such as a wildfire or mudslide can be more obvious and acute but may also allow for individuals to return home after a relatively brief evacuation, whereas a slower-onset change may affect livelihoods or lifestyles in a gradual but more profound way. Economic, security-related, and social impacts of climate change tend to be more immediate drivers of migration than climate effects alone.

Some humanitarian advocates and scholars have pushed to revisit the longstanding refugee definition, arguing that explicitly including people displaced by climate change would be the best and most efficient way to provide them legal protection. For instance, in 2023 the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Ian Fry, called for a new protocol to the 1951 Convention that would focus on people displaced internationally due to climate change.

Others, however, have long worried that such an approach would further buckle a humanitarian protection system that is already under intense operational pressure and is facing a serious erosion of political support in a number of countries. As the number of forcibly displaced people globally has grown to record highs in recent years, asylum systems in many receiving countries have faced significant capacity challenges and multiple governments have limited access to protection. As a legal matter, it would likely be exceedingly difficult for authorities to define who would qualify as a “climate refugee,” given the indirect way in which climate change usually affects migration. If a new refugee category were to be created, trying to adjudicate all the claims that emerge would further strain government systems, adding to backlogs and also potentially exacerbating public distrust of the humanitarian protection regime generally.

Countries Are Experimenting with New Legal Pathways

There has been little movement on the international stage to revise the refugee framework. Some governments, though, have attempted their own policy experiments—thus far to mixed success.

A notable early move was a 2017 experiment in New Zealand, launched at least partly to accommodate political pressures. The Labour Party had entered power for the first time in a decade and was pressed to both increase the country’s refugee intake and reduce net migration. In a landmark move, the government announced a new “experimental humanitarian visa” program granting legal entry to 100 Pacific Islanders displaced by rising seas. Even as the approach was small bore, it was hailed by figures including Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president turned climate campaigner.

The announcement came at an auspicious time. Just days earlier, New Zealand’s government had ruled that two families from Tuvalu were not eligible for refugee status because they did not meet a persecution condition spelled out in the Refugee Convention. The Immigration and Protection Tribunal reviewing the case conceded that climate change would pose challenges for the families, but “there is no basis for finding that any harm they do face as a result of the adverse impacts of climate change has any nexus whatsoever to any one of the five convention grounds.”

Despite the announcement, none of the experimental humanitarian visas were ever issued. The government backpedaled just a few months after announcing the new visa, in the face of opposition from Pacific Islanders who generally wanted help staying in their homes rather than an easy way to migrate. Many also did not want to be seen as refugees, which they considered a stigmatized category. “I have never encouraged the status of our people being refugees,” Kiribati’s president, Anote Tong, said a few years before New Zealand unveiled its proposal. “We have to acknowledge the reality that with the rising sea, the land area available for our populations will be considerably reduced and we cannot accommodate all of them, so some of them have to go somewhere, but not as refugees.”

A somewhat similar story played out in Argentina, which in 2022 launched a special humanitarian visa that would grant up to three years of legal residence to Caribbean, Central American, or Mexican individuals at high risk of being displaced by disasters. Unlike many pre-existing temporary protection programs that shield people already in a country from being returned to their disaster-affected homeland, Argentina’s program aimed to be proactive and preventive. Yet it does not seem as if anyone had received the visa at this writing.

The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union

Australia represents a more recent experiment, and one that has led to tangible results. In 2023, the country signed a deal with Tuvalu allowing up to 280 Tuvaluans to migrate to Australia each year under a new visa allowing them to work, study, and live in the country, but not as refugees. Known formally as the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union (falepili is Tuvaluan for “good neighborliness”), the agreement could theoretically pave the way for the entire country of Tuvalu, which has fewer than 12,000 residents, to have emigrated in about 40 years.

Notably, the visa is part of a broader agreement granting Australia de facto veto power over Tuvalu’s future international security agreements—which has been widely interpreted as Australian diplomatic maneuvering regarding China. As a result, some Tuvaluan critics felt the agreement could undermine Tuvalu’s sovereignty.

Still, the agreement has persisted, and more than half of Tuvaluans applied for the visa in 2025. Applicants are selected by random ballot, and the first recipients began arriving in Australia in December.

More Aspirational Approaches Remain Illusory

Officials in other countries have proposed experiments that are even more aspirational, but which generally remain in draft form. Still, they have become a subject of interest in some political corners, especially on the left and center-left.

For instance, in the United States, the Biden administration appeared to briefly consider a climate migration pathway that would supplement the existing refugee resettlement and asylum systems. Although it ultimately did not commit to anything, a 2021 White House report claimed the United States “does have a national interest” in creating a legal pathway for people fleeing “serious, credible threats to their life or physical integrity, including as a result of the direct or indirect impacts of climate change.” Democrats in the U.S. Congress for years have introduced bills to allow the annual arrival of tens of thousands of “climate-displaced persons,” in a channel that would exist alongside and in addition to the U.S. refugee resettlement system. Among the cosponsors of a 2019 version of the bill was then Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who later became vice president and the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. However, efforts such as these appear unlikely to gain traction under the Trump administration, which has deprioritized climate change as an area of focus and sharply limited humanitarian immigration.

In the United Kingdom, a group of Labour Party activists has called for offering refugee status to people forced to move because of climate change, as part of an expansive set of reforms dubbed the Green New Deal. The UK Green Party has also said that the country “has a duty to support people forced to move due to the changes in their home environment, whether internally or from abroad,” and has pledged to work with other countries “to develop an international treaty to protect the rights of those forced to flee their homes as a result of the climate emergency.”

Canada’s Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights has also suggested the government consider introducing new refugee pathways, including for people affected by climate change.

These sorts of proposals have a slim chance of being enacted at present. But they demonstrate that there is some political appetite for considering expansive new climate protection pathways.

New Tricks for an Old Legal System

At the same time, pioneering decisions by international and national-level legal bodies have suggested that decades-old frameworks could be applied to people fleeing environmental hazards in certain situations, without changing those frameworks. In particular, judges have pointed to the legal notion of nonrefoulement, which prohibits returning someone to a place where they would face various threats, and said that potential harms brought about by climate change could qualify.

In 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee, which is tasked with monitoring countries’ compliance with the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), determined that someone whose homeland was being devastated by climate change could be eligible for protection against refoulement. The first-of-its-kind decision concerned a native of the small Pacific Island country of Kiribati, named Ioane Teitiota, who had overstayed a work visa in New Zealand, was denied refugee status, and then deported, despite his claims that sea-level rise in his homeland was threatening his family’s existence. The coast was eroding and the ocean regularly spilled over and poked through the seawall, washing out roads and killing crops. “I’m the same as people who are fleeing war,” he told the BBC. “Those are who are afraid of dying, it’s the same as me. The sea level is coming up and I will die, like them.

Notably, the Human Rights Committee did not rule that Teitiota himself had been wrongfully deported; New Zealand had properly assessed his individual case, weighed the threats against him, and was within its right to conclude that he could safely be removed to Kiribati, the committee said. Nor did it determine that countries must resettle people facing climate change-related threats; its ruling was limited to whether authorities could deport someone already physically present in the destination country back to their origin. But it nonetheless said that “without robust national and international efforts, the effects of climate change in receiving states may expose individuals to a violation of their rights” under the ICCPR’s protections, “thereby triggering the nonrefoulement obligations of sending states.”

The obligation is certainly much more indirect than efforts to create new climate migration pathways, but it could have wide applicability. Human Rights Committee expert Yuval Shany said that the ruling “sets forth new standards that could facilitate the success of future climate change-related asylum claims.”

The International Court of Justice subsequently affirmed the connection, in a defining mid-2025 advisory opinion that more generally detailed how countries’ obligations impact human rights. “In the view of the court,” it said, “states have obligations under the principle of nonrefoulement where there are substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk of irreparable harm to the right to life” if someone is returned to their country of origin. Also that year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights declared that countries have a responsibility to protect people displaced internationally by the impacts of climate change, including by offering them visas, temporary residence permits, or other legal status to protect against refoulement.

An Emerging Practice

To be sure, the legal approach is only in its infancy and would only prevent governments from deporting people back to the most climate-devastated areas, rather than proactively extend migration rights and legal status to people currently living there. And it sets a high bar; as Teitiota’s own case shows, authorities could continue to deny protection to individuals if the hazards they face were deemed insufficiently extreme.

Still, the logic has been used to grant protection to at least some individuals. In late 2020, a court in France overturned a deportation order for a Bangladeshi man with a respiratory disease, ruling that he would have faced serious repercussions and possibly even death due to pollution in his native country. In 2024, an Italian court granted protection to another Bangladeshi man who had been living on flood-prone sand islands and had been displaced multiple times; returning him there would amount to inhumane and degrading treatment, the court determined.

Is a New Framework Even Necessary?

Would climate-affected migrants be better served by a new, climate-specific legal migration system? Not everyone is so sure.

Rather than create a process, some advocates argue that the best approach is to more proactively use existing legal work and other visa pathways. For instance, a former labor-mobility scheme allowed people in Colombia facing recurring natural disasters to temporarily migrate to and work in Spain, offering individuals both a chance to move and an opportunity to earn money that could be invested in protecting their homes. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has also advised governments that climate change can intersect with other forms of persecution in ways that might make an individual eligible for refugee status. So while a hypothetical individual farmer who had struggled through a drought would not be able to migrate as a refugee, they conceivably might qualify if they were a member of a marginalized ethnic group that had been forced onto barren lands and denied access to government support as result of their ethnicity. Additionally, the expansion of free-movement regimes in places such as the East and Horn of Africa, which faces regular drought and other hazards, has been heralded for helping allow people to legally escape dangerous circumstances.

Yet it seems likely that not everyone in need will be served by these pathways. As powerful governments simultaneously fall short of their carbon-reduction commitments and retract international humanitarian aid funding, a growing number of people will seek to move to escape the impacts of climate change. Only some of them will want or need to move internationally, but the globe has so far offered little ability for them to do so legally. Without change, they may either be forced to migrate without authorization or remain trapped as the environment around them deteriorates.

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