JJUB55144U Migration and Forced Displacement from Climate Change

Climate change is perhaps the defining challenge of the contemporary era. Among its many costs are the human consequences for those who reside in places that are the most severely impacted. Ocean inundation, soil salination, sea-level rise, drought, floods and other extreme weather events are now threatening both the livability and even the existence of some countries. People are faced with the extremely difficult decisions about whether and when to leave, but where should they go?
This course will examine the contemporary issue of climate migration from it’s a legal perspective, while taking account of the topic’s complexity outside the law. While climate change has an undoubtable impact on people’s lives, it is usually not the sole reason a person or family will relocate. Migration decisions are complex and take place at the intersection of social, environmental, political and economic pressures.
The course will examine the legal protections available to climate-induced migrants. There is no single legal instrument which protects climate migrants and as such their rights and responsibilities are derived from various legal frameworks.

The course will be broken into themes as follows:

• Who is a climate migrant? Conceptualising climate change as a migration trigger
• The legal framework governing climate change and its relevance to climate migration including the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement
• Migration-based legal responses: the law governing migration (including in Denmark), and the relevance of the 1951 Refugee Convention
• Protection-based legal responses: international human rights law and its application to climate change migrants
• Legal responses to disasters and the intersection with climate change and migration
• Disappearing states, statelessness and the application of the 1954 Statelessness Convention
• Future responses, including the possibility of a new international treaty for climate migrants