Why this story matters
- Because entire nations are watching their homelands disappear due to climate change, but the world has nowhere else for them to go.
- Because climate change may reshape lives on an unprecedented scale, with 1.2 billion people expected to be displaced by 2050.
- Because the world is running out of time to act and to choose compassion over chaos.
It’s unheard of for almost an entire nation to want to leave home. But in Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific island nation where seawater now floods homes at high tide, 80% of residents applied to relocate to Australia last year, not because of war or persecution, but because their country is drowning.
See also: What can we learn from Tuvalu’s planned climate migration? | Experts’ Opinions
Tuvaluans are among the world’s first climate refugees, signaling that the great climate migration of the 21st century has already started. Yet international law offers them no protection. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention does not recognize climate displacement, leaving those forced to flee without status, rights, or guaranteed safety.
A protection gap on a planet on the move
According to a new UN report, climate-related disasters have displaced 250 million people globally over the last decade, nearly 70,000 every day, with scientists warning this number could reach 1.2 billion by 2050.
For low-lying Pacific nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati, where most of the land sits barely two to three meters above sea level, climate displacement is not a distant threat; it is a daily struggle with tides, storms, and salt intrusion that poisons crops and drinking water.
The legal void: Why climate refugees don’t exist
The 1951 UN Refugee Convention protects people fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, or social group, but not those escaping submerged homes, islands that have become uninhabitable, or rising seas. As a result, millions displaced by climate change are left in a legal vacuum. They are neither refugees nor protected persons; they are simply “migrants” whose displacement the law refuses to name.
This gap was highlighted in the Teitiota v. New Zealand case, when a Kiribati citizen, Ioane Teitiota, argued that climate change had made his homeland uninhabitable. The UN Human Rights Committee rejected his claim, saying the threat was not imminent, underscoring how almost impossible it is to claim asylum on climate grounds.
The rise of national band-aids for a global wound
With no global framework, countries have introduced ambitious but scattered, fragile solutions.
- Australia’s 2023 Falepili Union treaty with Tuvalu was the world’s first climate migration pact, granting 280 Tuvaluans permanent residency in Australia each year. It is historic but tiny compared to the need.
- New Zealand proposed the world’s first climate humanitarian visa for Pacific Islanders in 2017. The plan was shelved six months later and has never been revisited.
- Argentina introduced a humanitarian visa for nationals of 23 natural-disaster-hit Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2022, but it remains unused.
- The United States acknowledged the scale of future climate migration in 2021 and called for a protection framework, but no legislation followed.
The pattern is clear: awareness is growing, but action remains fragmented and politically vulnerable, leading to a far from coherent international protection system.
The human cost: When borders decide who survives
Without global standards, host countries set their own rules, often imposing strict quotas or eligibility criteria, and even lottery systems that can tear families apart. Some schemes exclude people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, who are often most at risk.
Alieta’s story, documented by Amnesty International, captures this cruelty. A teacher from Tuvalu with a visual impairment, she removed her name from her family’s visa application in 2016 to increase their odds of selection for New Zealand. Her husband and six-year-old daughter were selected. She was not. They have been separated ever since.
Climate and labor mobility expert Tupai Fotu Jackson stresses: “We need a humanitarian visa pathway that recognizes climate displacement not as a crisis of desperation, but as a reality that demands planning, dignity, and partnership.”
The path forward: visas, law, and finance
Humanitarian visas are a vital lifeline, but they are not a permanent fix. Closing the protection gap will require a three-pronged approach:
- Updating international law: Expanding the 1951 Refugee Convention to include those displaced by climate change, using broader regional definitions such as in Latin America’s 1984 Cartagena Declaration and Africa’s 1969 OAU Convention.
- Financing climate resilience: Operationalizing the Loss and Damage Fund, agreed at COP27, to help vulnerable communities to rebuild and adapt, and avoid forced displacements.
- Creating safe mobility pathways: As the International Organization for Migration Deputy Director General Ugochi Daniels explained at COP30, “When it becomes impossible to stay, people must be able to move safely and with dignity.”
Planned relocation, legal pathways, and adaptation support must be established in advance so that survival never depends on luck, borders, or politics.
A system built for a disappearing world
The improvised response to climate displacement reveals a deeper truth: the International Refugee Convention was not built for a crisis where entire nations may become uninhabitable.
Until international law adapts, millions will continue to rely on the fragile generosity of individual countries, hoping it will last long enough for them to find higher ground.
