More and more we are hearing stories about “climate refugees.”  U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell used the term to describe the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, a community which this year became the first to receive federal funding to relocate in its entirety from their sinking island home on the Louisiana coast.

More and more we are hearing stories about “climate refugees.”  U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell used the term to describe the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, a community which this year became the first to receive federal funding to relocate in its entirety from their sinking island home on the Louisiana coast.

Yet climate change-induced migration and displacement actually “falls outside of the more traditional protection regimes like the refugee treaty,” says Maxine Burkett, a public policy fellow with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, in this week’s podcast.

“Most of the migration that’s going to happen as a result of climate change happens internally within countries,” Burkett says. Managing such movement is clearly the purview of national governments.

The harder question is how to deal with those who move across international borders. The UN Refugee Convention was agreed to by states in 1951 and establishes clear protections and specific circumstances under which those protections can be invoked, namely political persecution and the threat of violence.

Climate change – which researchers are finding can play a role in displacement, migration, and vulnerability, though not always as a clear, primary driver – cannot currently be invoked by asylum seekers in search of refugee status in another country. And since the legal definition isn’t codified, descriptive labels such as climate refugee do not bind states to any responsibilities.

This is “a yawning gap in our conversation,” Burkett says. “What are we asking the others to do in order to meet our rights?”

“Without the right name or legal nomenclature, the rights of those within country and especially those in foreign countries – their status rights – are uncertain…The importance of nomenclature in the advancing of human rights is significant.”

The Nansen Initiative, established by Switzerland and Norway in October 2012, was created in response to the lack of legal frameworks for climate change-induced cross-border migration and displacement. It began with the aim of creating protections for those displaced by climate change, but pivoted to address all disasters. Its successor is now simply the Platform on Disaster Displacement. “What is paramount, I think they would argue, is to meet the needs of those who are migrating by assigning and allowing them to exercise their rights,” Burkett says. “Nevermind why they had to move.”

Yet combining climate change with other environmental drivers of migration and displacement has costs. It “scrubs” the downstream discussion about solutions of “significant rights language that would be more reparative than simply accommodating,” she says. “Climate change is not a random, faultless act of God, but something other.” The systems of rights and reciprocations we agree on in response should reflect this.

In the meantime, the initial inequity of anthropogenic climate change – that those who are most vulnerable are by and large the least responsible for creating the problem – is perpetuated as, at best, the displaced can only hope that someone lets them in.