No Law for the Drowning: Asylum and Refugee Rights for Climate-Affected Persons

Abstract

Climate change is displacing people at a scale and speed that international law was never designed to handle. The 1951 Refugee Convention, built on the logic of political persecution, has no category for a family driven from their home by rising seas, a farmer whose land has turned to dust, or an entire community whose island will not exist in twenty years. These people are real. Their suffering is measurable. But in the eyes of international law, they are largely invisible. This paper examines who climate-affected persons are, why their daily lives are so difficult, how the current refugee and asylum framework fails them, what the United Nations has done to respond, and what genuine reform must look like. It argues that the absence of a binding, purpose-built legal instrument for climate displacement is not an oversight. It is a choice, and it is a choice that can and must be reversed.