The climate refugee - a new juridico-political category

Climate change has originated growing phenomena involving the displacement of affected people or groups of people across different regions and countries around the world. Climate displacement has increasingly drawn the attention of migration and environmental researchers, legal, global affairs and development specialists. However, the concept of “climate refugees” corresponds to a juridico-political protection status which is still not internationally recognized. Humanity is already confronted with the limits to its own sustainability and it will have to take fundamental, practical resolutions in the near future which will impact decisively on the current economic and consumption models, and on global population growth trends. Climate change is a reality proven by numerous scientific studies and factual evidence accumulated over, at least, the past 60 years, as well as by the documented life experiences of millions of human beings spread around the globe. Based on different contributions, I propose a broader, humanist definition for the concept of “climate refugees” – desirably contributing to the debate on the harmonized international legal framework necessary for the recognition of such legal protection status and juridico-political category. Thus, I pave the way towards a more comprehensive and humanist definition of “climate refugees” within the framework of integral of human development and its correlative concept of integral ecology.