JJUB55187U Climate Change, Disasters and Human Mobility

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.
cean 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 difficult decisions about whether and when to leave, and if they do, where to go.
This course examines the contemporary issue of climate change and its impact on human mobility and migration from it’s a legal perspective, while taking account of the topic’s complexity outside the law.

The course will be broken into themes as follows:

• Who is a climate migrant? Conceptualising climate change as a factor that is causing and impeding human mobility, both within and across borders
• The nexus between climate change and other drivers of migration, and the protections available under the 1951 Refugee Convention, regional refugee arrangements and the Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa
• Legal responses to disasters, their prevention and response, and the intersection with human mobility including under the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the ideas encompassed in the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disaster
• Disappearing states, statelessness and the relevance and application of the 1954 Statelessness Convention
• Human rights law including recent cases before UN human rights treaty bodies which have considered the application of the principle of non-refoulement in the context of climate change and the unique protections afforded to indigenous communities and also to children.
• The legal framework governing climate change and its relevance to climate migration, including the Taskforce on Displacement created under the auspices of the Paris Agreement and recent trends in climate change litigation under human rights arrangements
• Solutions available through legal frameworks, including options and methods for opening regular migration pathways, enhancing local resilience to climate related hazards through planning, property and human rights law, and the possibility of a new international treaty for climate migrants.