Climate migrants and climate justice: challenging the colonial risks of international protection

• In Event: GREEN Panel 4, Climate Colonialism and Environmental Injustice: Displacement, Exploitation, and Resistance

Abstract

Climate migration is a striking example of global climate injustice, yet current international legal frameworks fail to provide specific and adequate protection for climate-displaced populations. The prevailing approach, which seeks to incorporate climate migrants into existing categories of international protection, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention or subsidiary protection, carries significant colonial risks. By framing the issue solely in terms of humanitarian aid and protection, this approach reinforces a paternalistic dynamic where the Global North grants or denies legal status to displaced people without addressing its own responsibility for their displacement.
This legal framework legitimizes a system in which migration is seen as the only solution while ignoring the right of affected communities to remain in their territories. A climate justice perspective challenges this narrative, emphasizing the climate debt of industrialized nations and their duty to ensure that vulnerable populations are not forced to migrate in the first place.
Instead of reinforcing a neocolonial system of selective protection, legal and political responses must shift toward acknowledging historical responsibility, ensuring reparative measures, and recognizing the fundamental right to stay of climate-affected populations. Without this shift, international protection risks perpetuating global inequalities rather than addressing them.

Author

• Valeria Ferraris, University of Turin