Climate Change, Displaced People and Refugees: Unsettled Debates on Legal Status and Human Rights Issues

The consequences of climate change has attributed to other branches of international law particularly international refugee law due to the fact that climate change induced disaster, catastrophe, rising of sea level, droughts and other instances are causes for human displacement and in near future, many island countries will be disappeared and many other regions will be uninhabitable for human which further strengthen the linkage with refugee law. Although climate refugee is a known concept, it is yet to be defined in any international instrument and also that currently international law prescribes no right to environment as an explicit and independent human right. Climate issue and human rights are two streams of international law and hence linking them is a precondition in order to overcome this lacuna. There are predictions based on scientific resources that have suggested that up to 250 million people could be displaced by the middle of this century as a result of climate change. In 2012, New Zealand refused to grant refugee status to citizens of Kiribati on the ground of climate change. As there has been argument and prediction that Maldives and some pacific islands near Australia will disappear due to the adverse impact of climate change with the rising of sea level water and many localities will be inhabitable due to inability to grow crops or obtaining fresh water, current international law provides no mechanism to deal with such situations. Furthermore, the combination of economic and geographic vulnerabilities makes the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) especially vulnerable to the security implication of climate change. From the current context of Bangladesh it is manifest how adversely climate change has been affecting where the number of internally displaced persons is increasing. Flood of 2017 in Bangladesh is one of the glaring examples. This issue has triggered a new challenge for both human rights and environmental lawyers. The lacuna is not only limited to the substantive instruments, but there is no particular institution dealing with such. It is therefore can be stated that displacement due to climate change is a de facto problem currently lacking a de jure solution. The study will propose few plausible ways to overcome this existing challenge by giving them legal status under existing human rights law.