Hoora Hossein Zadeh Hashemi - University of Helsinki, Finland

Climate change is a consequence of industrialization, frequently from the most developed regions of the World and has its main distressing impacts on people’s lives commonly in the poorest areas. One of the most devastating impacts of climate change is making the living environment of many people uninhabitable. Massive movement of climate change-induced migrants is a crisis of the current century. Although many people would move to find a better future or increase the quality of their lives, unfortunately many are forced to move because there is no alternative. The predictions illustrate that the potential number of climate change migrants will grow to over 250 million till 2050. Some studies declare that only slight margin of this population will cross international borders and most of these relocations would happen internally. The impacts of climate change such as sea level rise, drought, water scarcity and frequency of extreme weather, have their most destructive pressure on the deprived parts of world; places which geographically located in hazardous lands, suffer from lack of financial resources and there is no powerful political regime to prevent and overcome these natural disasters. Hence, it is not surprising that affected people in these areas generally are not willing or cannot afford to leave their home country and will relocate domestically. Even if it would be assumed that some groups of climate change refugees will be protected by Convention on the Protection of Refugees (1951), this short distance movement, made the massive number of climate change-induced displaced persons out of the context of the convention. On the other hand, UN Guiding Principles on Internally Displaced Persons (1998), as a non-binding instrument, recognize the primary duty of the national governments to assist and provide protection for people who move within their territories; while it is mentioned that domestic governments in these vulnerable regions are not politically powerful enough to provide adaptive measures and protect the climate change-induced internal migrants. However, in the overly connected world we have, this short-term internal movement may in the long run lead to the international relocation adds to numbers initially migrating cross borders. Thus, the problem caused by the coming waves of internally migration due to the impacts of global warming will not remain within the borders of one state. Accordingly, international protection is needed not only for those who initially cross international borders but also for people who move within the borders of their own countries.

Climate change, Internal displacement, Migration, Refugee, Global warming