Climate Change & Forced Migration

Forced migration due to environmental or climate change is going to be one of our greatest challenges going forward in the 21st century. Through this paper we make an attempt to probe into some nuances of forced climate migration and try to suggest an approach that can act as a guiding principle to the legal framework to be adopted to deal with the problem. Through this article we first try to define forced international migration due to climate change or environmental change. Through analysis of various extant definitions, we realise that a comprehensive definition to forced international migration can be arrived at by the definitions offered by International organisation on Migration and scholars like Myers and Kent. We then look at some historical as well as contemporary examples of forced climate migration to underscore the gravity and the magnitude of the problem. We realise through these examples that even though the proportion of climate refugees among all refugees is not the highest as of now, it has the potential to snowball into one of our greatest challenges. We then analyse the problem through a gender perspective. Consequences of International migration do not reflect equally on the genders, we see that an overwhelming number of international migrants as of now are male but the negative consequences impact the marginalised gender disproportionately. The final section of the paper deals with the examination of the existing legal framework with regards to International Migration arising out of Climate Change. On perusal of existing policies and framework documents we conclude that even though international bodies like the United Nations (UN) and International Organisation on Migration (IOM) have a clear-cut approach to migration in general their approach to Climate migration in particular is still deficient.