After the research for this thesis was completed, it was discovered that the aforementioned hypothesis was correct. Regions that experience the consequences of climate change the most have already created advocacy and working groups and partnerships that aim to work against climate change and bring awareness to the consequences of it as much as possible. However, major countries like Russia and China feel that the UN and its advocacy committees are ill equipped to handle the consequences of climate change and other environmental initiatives. This reality has led to refugees displaced by climate change being stuck in a legal grey area and being unable to defend themselves against statelessness, food scarcity, and the desire to proactively escape irreparable situations.

Chapter 1: Introduction

There is a growing concern regarding population groups’ displacement due to climate change. The negative changes caused by climate change have resulted in increasing sea levels and other detrimental consequences that make some environments uninhabitable. The forced migrations which result from climate change highlight the need for governments and legal authorities to protect the migrants and refugees who are the human victims of climate change. The formal recognition of climate change-based migration does not exist in international agreements. This presents a legal gap between the protections victims of forced migration can receive and the solutions that governments can present to them once they arrive into their jurisdictions (Wilkinson et al. 2016, p. 1). As a result, the current lack of government-led solutions and interventions leaves millions of individuals with no basic rights once they reach new areas of refuge.

Climate change-related migration is the movement of people who are forcibly displaced by environmental changes which make their current places of residence uninhabitable (McDonnell 2018, para. 1-4; Wilkinson et al. 2016, p. 1). Almost every case of climate change-related migration is involuntary and influenced by natural disasters and geographic features and barriers that make human residents unable to adapt to their homelands’ flooding, heat, and inability to produce fertile lands for farming and livestock (Climate Refugees n.d. Climate Refugees section, para. 2; Swift n.d., para. 1). At times, forced migration was most associated with armed conflicts (Climate Refugees n.d. Climate Refugees section, para. 2; Galbraith 1998-1999, p. 597). Now, the international community is faced with a new category of migrants who are not currently covered under the international policies that were designed to protect prisoners of war and unarmed civilians (Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health n.d., The Geneva Conventions section, para. 1-5; Fernandez 2015, para. 3-5).

Today’s political infrastructure identifies several types of migrants who are offered legal protections under international law. However, migrants who are associated with the consequences of climate change do not fall under any of these categories. This is a problem because the number of refugees who are associated with climate change-induced disasters is increasing. In their research, Arenilla and Rada (2020) write that statelessness is becoming a more prominent problem in the international community. This is due to small island states in the