Reconceptualizing the Climate 'Refugee' in International Law: Prioritising an Ecofeminist and Decolonial Paradigm

My research project critically explores the gap in international law addressing the protection of climate
'refugees', those forced to flee their homelands because of climate change impacts, with the aim of
offering an alternative legal paradigm to grapple with future cross-border climate induced mobility. Since
2008, an annual average of 22.5 million people has been forcibly displaced by climate related events
(GRID 2018; UNHCR 2020). Without proper action, these figures are estimated to rise, with more than 1
billion people potentially displaced internationally by 2050 due to climatic factors (IEP, 2020) and at least
216 million people internally displaced across six regions (World Bank Groundswell Report, 2021).
Despite this catastrophic scenario, States continue to miss international climate targets, as reiterated by
COP27. Moreover, while extensive literature acknowledges the urgency of finding legal responses
(Atapattu, 2015; McAdam, 2012; Gemenne 2018), the current international legal framework remains illequipped
to provide protection for climate 'refugees'. International legal institutions have failed to
provide a satisfactory response to date (UNHRC, Teitiota v. New Zealand, 2020) and national migration
policies continue to overlook climate change as a migration driver (McLeman, 2020).
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My research argues that the heart of the problem is embedded in the way the climate-mobility nexus is
understood, conceptualized and addressed under current international law. This reflects a 'coloniality of
knowledge' (Mignolo, 2000), as the epistemological foundations of migration and climate change legal
studies universalize a Eurocentric vision (Woldemariam, 2019; Collins; 2022, Sultana, 2022), and
generate an epistemic hierarchy (Adelman, 2015).
My approach builds on the need for 'new normative narratives based on more expansive sources of
knowledge'(McLeman, 2014), as concepts such as sovereignty, borders, post-facto orientation, binary
thinking dividing migrant/refugees, human/nature, vulnerability/adaptation perpetuate a Western
paradigm that hinders a holistic response to climate displacement. Thus, my research responds to the
necessity to reconceptualize the climate change-human mobility nexus by adopting decolonial
perspectives (Sultana, 2022), and drawing on ecofeminist theories (Fineman, 2014; Harris, 2015; Shiva
2014) to provide an alternative legal paradigm, suitable to resolve future climate displacement.
Therefore, my research questions are:
What are the obstacles within the current international legal framework leaving climate 'refugees' in a
legal impasse?
How can prioritising ecofeminist and decolonial perspectives benefit a reconceptualization of the climatemobility
nexus?
Which concepts from ecofeminism and decolonial perspectives can inform the epistemological
foundation of climate and refugee law? How can they be incorporated?
I adopt a doctrinal research method with a particular emphasis on indigenous literature (Suliman, 2019;
Whyte, 2019) and epistemologies of the South, as they seek to overcome ethical, economic and
epistemological limits of Western knowledge in solving climate-related issues (Shiva, 2014). By valuing
plural epistemologies to reframe the climate 'refugee', the originality of my research intends to challenge
the dominant Eurocentric approach in analysing climate displacement and propose new ways forward to
timely respond to the issue. My findings will be shared at international and regional (European) level, by
collaborating with the International Organization for Migration and EU Agency for Asylum to inform and
influence the policy agenda.