Climate migration is at Europe's doorstep, and the continent is far from ready.

Climate Refugee” by Mohammad Ponir Hoassain, 2014.

The night before the rains came, Hassan’s family stayed awake, their eyes scanning the horizons of their hometown in Sudan for rising waters. His father, restless, muttered warnings under his breath. His mother held her youngest close, her voice filled with anxiety as she whispered prayers into the thick, humid air. Mother Nature had been turning increasingly unwelcoming to the local community, leaving them to fight for survival.

Hassan with his family in Sudan in the early 2000s.

In the agricultural region of Al Jazirah, Hassan’s place of origin in Sudan, rains are a cursed blessing. Floodwaters rush in like a thief in the night, swallowing homes, roads, and fields in their path. When we meet Hassan in Naples, Italy, he tells us about the erratic rainfalls that alternated with prolonged droughts. The extreme climate conditions destroyed agricultural fields and homes, forcing the disadvantaged to move within Sudan and those with resources to seek refuge abroad.

Hassan pointing at Wad Madani, his hometown in Al Jazirah, Sudan.

In 2014, at the age of 32, Hassan refused to suffer any longer and decided to make a move. This meant leaving his family in Sudan and fleeing the country in search of a promising place to live, a place with a future.

His story is part of a startling and growing crisis: the rise of climate refugees. As climate change intensifies, millions are being forced to leave their homeland or stay and face the dire consequences. Given the circumstances, the rapidly unfolding phenomenon of climate migration remains shockingly overlooked, with no clear definition or legal protection within international and European asylum frameworks.

Sudan: a country in peril

In the decade since Hassan’s departure, Sudan’s climate crisis has only worsened. Arable land is dwindling and degrading as proper food has become a precious commodity due to prolonged drought and/or devastating floods. The United Nations warns of an alarming food crisis, with child malnutrition at emergency levels. Just in the past year, record downpour levels washed away entire rural shelters and displaced communities in areas adjacent to Hassan’s village.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. A civil war of attrition, reignited in 2023, coupled with climate extremes, has pushed Sudan to the brink of the world’s worst displacement crisis. Part of the decade-long civil war in Sudan stems from fighting over waning natural resources. According to the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), climate change doesn’t directly cause conflict, but it acts as a powerful catalyst. Natural disasters shrink access to vital resources, such as water and farmland, turning scarcity into a spark for inter-communal violence. Hassan’s decision to flee Sudan and seek asylum in Europe reflects the impact of this dangerous dynamic, in which climate change plays an indisputably instrumental role.

The International Organisation for Migration defines climate migration as “the movement of a person or groups of persons who, predominantly for reasons of sudden or progressive change in the environment due to climate change, are obliged to leave their habitual place of residence, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, within a State or across an international border.”

Across borders, countless others face a similar fate. In 2023 alone, climate-related hazards like floods, storms, and wildfires caused 26.4 million displacements, according to data from the International Displacement Monitoring Centre.

We talked to other individuals who testify to the experience of climate migration, like 30-year-old Mehran, whose life in Iran was once filled with promise. In regions like Khuzestan in southwestern Iran, agriculture, the backbone of local economies, is crumbling under the weight of climate change. Droughts, extreme heat, and water scarcity are exacerbating the situation, leaving farmers like Mehran with little choice but to leave their land in Khuzestan in search of a future elsewhere.

Mehran has witnessed firsthand the slow but relentless destruction of his homeland. He inherited tens of acres of fertile land and, like his father before him, made a livelihood out of agriculture. He recalls the days when he could rely on the bountiful harvests of sugar cane, a staple crop in his region. He felt content and fulfilled, he remarks. Unfortunately, it was a short-lived reality; he never imagined climate change would alter his life in the blink of an eye.

Dam Karun-2, which was set up on the river in 2014. (Photo: Tejarat News)

“I had acres of land in my birthplace of Khuzestan, but dwindling irrigation sources put an end to farming, which was my ancestral occupation,” he shares with us via a video call. Even after his land became unfit to farm, he refused to throw in the towel. Mehran stuck it out in Iran for as long as he could, determined to sustain his profession by switching from farming to packaging.

Tragically, prolonged drought halted agricultural production, leaving him with mounting costs and almost no orders to pack. The scale of the disaster was so huge that in 2021, Khuzestan saw a chain of violent and deadly protests over water and climate decimation.

Lake Urmia in Iran is one of the world's largest landlocked salt lakes, but it is shrinking, as these satellite images from 1998 (left) and 2011 (right) show. (Photo: NASA Earth Observatory)

Since 2023, Mehran has been in Germany, not as a climate migrant but as a student pursuing vocational training in greenhouse farming. He decided to leave Iran after he could no longer find ways to sustain himself and his family. “I can tell you if it was not for the rapid climate erosion in my birthplace, I would not have decided to leave my country and immigrate to Europe,” laments Mehran, whose family in Iran continues to struggle with the ramifications of climate change.

Scorching land & boiling rivers: Gulzar's journey from Punjab to Sindh

In another part of the world, Gulzar Mai works shifts as a maid in multiple households in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi. She reminisces about the time she lived with her family in her village in Punjab, her house nestled amid the greenery of Mail Si, a small agricultural town in the north-east of the country. Now she lives in a rented room in Karachi with her 8-year-old daughter, making ends meet while her husband looks after his late parents’ home back in the village.

“I migrated to Karachi out of compulsion; otherwise, nobody willingly leaves their home and family behind,” she shares with us. Extreme weather in summer and winter forced her to move down south in search of an alternate source of income because “the heat was far too unbearable back home.”

Gulzar Mai's hands are a testament to the laborious work she did in the fields.

Gulzar tells us of unprecedented monsoon seasons in East Punjab that blow roofs off homes and uproot trees, wreaking havoc and exceeding villagers’ tight budget for repairs. She recalls the relentless rains tearing houses apart and leaving fields submerged, robbing villagers of “their only source of income, wheat, right before the harvest season.”

"There is not a single day that I do not think of going back to my village,” says Gulzar Mai. “If I close my eyes, I can picture it, and I wish I could be teleported back home and never leave.”

As a result of climate change, more than 20 per cent of Pakistan's land area and 50 per cent of its population are expected to be severely affected in the near future. According to the Germanwatch Report 2020, Pakistan lost 9,989 lives, suffered economic losses worth $3.8 billion and witnessed 152 extreme weather events from 1999 to 2018. This is not surprising given that Pakistan is ranked as the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.

The progression of the flooding in Sindh province (Pakistan) in 2022 during monsoon rains, when floodwaters inundated 75,000 square kilometres of the country. (Photo: VIIRS’ satellite infrared image from NASA Earth Observatory)

An alarming projection by the Future Urban Climates project from the University of Maryland warns that the Al Jazirah and Punjab regions are on the brink of climate catastrophe. This echoes the dystopian forecast for the areas where Gulzar and Hassan grew up. When searching climate analogue mapping predictions for Wad Madani, Hassan’s hometown, the screen reads: “Future climate for this location is expected to be unlike anything currently found anywhere on Earth.”

From the Future Urban Climates Project website (University of Maryland).

Linking the crisis: who classifies as a climate refugee?

Last November, the closing statement at the COP29 climate conference in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku warned of unprecedented global temperatures. A subsequent UN report highlighted an even more alarming consequence: cross-border climate displacement is not a small-scale phenomenon, shattering the myth that climate migration is limited to internal displacement.

*No Escape: On the Frontlines of Climate Change, Conflict and Forced Displacement* (released by the UNHCR in November 2024).

Yet, despite growing evidence, international law remains ill-suited to protect those displaced by climate change. The terms “climate refugee” and “climate migration” are neither defined nor enshrined in international law, nor are they part of the European Asylum Framework. Instead, international organisations such as the UNHCR use vague phrases like “persons displaced in the context of disasters and climate change,” leaving a wide margin for interpretation.

“Climate-induced displacement is rarely a direct consequence of a single factor, and this complicates efforts to categorise or respond to it effectively. For Europe, a key destination for many climate-displaced refugees, the law does not recognise climate-induced calamities as sufficient grounds for granting asylum. Under the EU’s Qualification Directive, which defines the criteria to get refugee status, international protection is granted primarily based on fear of persecution or risk of serious harm, such as torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, or indiscriminate violence due to armed conflict. ”

We spoke with Gabriela Nagle Alverio, PhD candidate and scholar in environmental policy and climate migration at Duke University. She is one of the leading experts researching the impacts of climate change on migration and immobility. She underscores that the legal vacuum in EU law forces people “to get creative essentially for different reasons.” This means individuals seeking asylum in the EU have to argue for already established legal grounds, even if their asylum-seeking is firmly grounded in climate-triggered situations.

Take the case of Umer, one of the Pakistanis we interviewed. The 26-year-old made the difficult decision to migrate from his hometown in Punjab, Pakistan, to start afresh in Germany, but on the basis of higher education. “I came here on a student visa, and my move was a combination of multiple factors; climate change was one of them,” he tells us. Showing signs of distress, Umer describes scenes from back home: “My hometown went from a heavenly beautiful place to a hellish place. We feel the heat more during summers, the rains are extreme during the monsoon season, and winters are unbearably cold. At the moment, it still hasn’t rained in my region; it used to be an agricultural land and would experience substantial rainfall during this period.”

The deteriorating political, economic and environmental conditions forced him to seek life abroad, and Germany was the most viable option for him. With little to no costs of tuition for international students in Germany, Umer opted to study in Dortmund with the modest savings he had left, hoping to build a future for his wife, daughter, and parents in a foreign country.

Since German laws have yet to recognise and provide protection to climate-induced migrants, one of the most common ways for some migrants to gain access to Germany is via academia. His story echoes other South Asian natives, like Aakash from Bangladesh, another student residing in Germany, who believes a legal path for climate migration is the need of the hour, “to protect vulnerable people, especially as it is a growing and unavoidable issue.”

In their desperation to secure legal protection, some resort to extreme means to obtain refugee status. As expert Gabriela Nagle Alverio points out, there are “people becoming environmental advocates because of the dire climate situation, which exposes them to persecution by the state. And then they have a way to become a refugee because of political persecution and not climate.”

Ambiguous waters: no concrete protection

Climate-induced displacement is rarely a direct consequence of a single factor, and this complicates efforts to categorise or respond to it effectively. For Europe, a key destination for many climate-displaced refugees, the law does not recognise climate-induced calamities as sufficient grounds for granting asylum. Under the EU’s Qualification Directive, which defines the criteria to get refugee status, international protection is granted primarily based on fear of persecution or risk of serious harm, such as torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, or indiscriminate violence due to armed conflict.

For individuals fleeing environmental calamities, the EU’s asylum system provides little recourse, essentially leaving this question unanswered: What if the cause of danger is not direct persecution or violence by other humans, but environmental devastation—a consequence of extreme weather, rising sea levels, or prolonged droughts stemming from human activity over decades and centuries? The EU asylum system does not seem to account for these scenarios.

“We need to improve how we interview people when gathering data about migration to uncover the underlying reasons for their movement. Migration often has multiple drivers, and it’s crucial to recognise that climate factors may play a significant role, even if individuals can’t explicitly connect them to their decision to leave.”

— Gabriela Nagle Alverio

Climate migrants may not fit neatly into the traditional asylum categories, but there’s a glimmer of hope in a key piece of international human rights law: the principle of non-refoulement. Unlike the rigid frameworks of EU asylum regulations, this principle has universal reach, protecting anyone at risk of serious harm—regardless of their legal status. At its core, non-refoulement forbids the return of individuals to countries where their lives or freedoms are in grave danger due to persecution, violence, or other severe threats.

Here is the twist: while non-refoulement has long been associated with shielding people from political or social persecution, it has increasingly been deployed to encompass risks associated with the climate crisis, such as environmental degradation or life-threatening natural disasters. Court rulings in the US, Germany, France, Austria, Denmark and Sweden have granted protection to climate migrants under this human rights framework.

However, Camilla Schloss, a judge at the Administrative Court of Berlin and an expert in international migration law, emphasises the intricacies and difficulties of this type of protection. In a 2021 study, she argues that asylum claims based solely on natural disasters are typically only successful in exceptional cases, meaning evidence has to be very strongly and directly in support of the claim to convince the court, which is a rarity in the legal system.

One successful case happened in 2019 before the Higher Administrative Court in Mannheim in Germany’s Baden-Württemberg province. An Afghan applicant successfully invoked the non-refoulement principle due to Afghanistan’s severe drought. Similarly, in 2020, a Somali applicant sought protection under the same framework at the Administrative Court in Freiburg. In both cases, argues Judge Schloss, environmental factors did not constitute the sole basis for protection but were used to strengthen arguments for a ban on deportation.

The unique case of Italy

Hassan, our protagonist, now works and studies in Naples, Italy. We met him in a cafè on a warm December afternoon in 2024. He said that in Wad Madani, a once sprawling agricultural hub and the second-largest city in Sudan, agriculture shaped every aspect of life but became harder to sustain over the years: “When heavy rains came, the village was flooded. We would have to evacuate because the water sometimes submerged villages and blocked roads.”

The destruction was relentless. “Upon our return, our house would be destroyed by the water,” he recalls. “Ever since I was a child, that’s how it’s been. At any moment, anything can happen, and you just know that.” It wasn't just the unpredictable floods that brought destruction; the land itself seemed to rebel against its people. During dry spells, “the soil would crack open and the earth split wide as if the land was tearing apart.”

Sudan's cracked, dry earth speaks volumes about the impact of climate change on locals. (Photo: Albert González Farran, United Nations)

Yet, rain during the droughts amounted to an even worse sequence of events. “When the rains would finally come, the water would seep into the gaping cracks, flooding everything,” says Hassan. The sight of the fractured earth became a grim omen for the community, a constant reminder of how the very ground they relied on for survival was becoming uninhabitable.

Faced with these increasingly harsh conditions, Hassan, the only one in his family with the resources to migrate, embarked on a perilous and costly journey. With some money scraped together by his mother and friends, and more earned along the way, he headed to Europe, the nearest place of safety that he could think of. He crossed the desert through Chad, followed by a year-long stopover in Libya. Finally, he set out across the Mediterranean, spending four days at sea on an overcrowded rubber raft.

Find the interactive map at https://www.pampam.city/p/6iCyM4yBepSkm6p2z2Bp.

In September 2014, amid tragedies of capsized refugee boats making headlines, Hassan’s raft made it to Sicily and then eventually to Salerno, just weeks before Mare Nostrum, an operation designed to prevent further deaths of people migrating to Europe via the Mediterranean, concluded its mission. In the same year, nearly 9,000 Sudanese refugees arrived in Italy via this treacherous route.

Grateful to have made it to Italy, Hassan had another hurdle awaiting him: navigating the complex bureaucratic system. Italy stands out as the only EU country explicitly offering legal protection to people displaced by disasters, climate change, and environmental degradation. Yet, the system’s patchy legal support and lack of clear communication about available protections left him uncertain about his options. It was only later that Hassan discovered Italian law provides temporary humanitarian protection, including a renewable six-month residence permit for those fleeing environmentally unsafe conditions.

Chiara Scissa, a researcher on disaster displacement in EU asylum law, has written extensively on Italy’s unique position on the matter. In a 2023 blog post, she asserts that Italy’s approach “avoids leaving vulnerable persons in a normative limbo,” offering legal protections that might otherwise be inaccessible to migrants caught in environmental crises. However, the application of these laws is limited, and the process is far from straightforward for migrants. Between 2018 and 2021, only 153 applications were filed under this form of protection—far fewer than the 80,000+ individuals granted other forms of asylum during the same period.

This disparity highlights a critical gap: the lack of preparedness and guidelines among legal professionals to handle such cases, as Scissa points out. Despite Italy’s unique legal framework for climate migrants, a gap in clarity and communication often leaves migrants unaware of their eligibility.

“We need to improve how we interview people when gathering data about migration to uncover the underlying reasons for their movement,” emphasises Gabriela Nagle Alverio. “Migration often has multiple drivers, and it’s crucial to recognise that climate factors may play a significant role, even if individuals can’t explicitly connect them to their decision to leave,” she urges.

Rethinking responsibilities

Climate migration is a pressing issue, but its complicated nature and wide consequences defy a clear-cut definition and complicate the eligibility of the people who could potentially fall under this (invisible) category.

“The UN predicts that the recent wave of climate migration is just the beginning. By 2040, the number of countries facing extreme climate hazards is expected to surge from three to 65, creating unprecedented challenges. Without concerted international efforts, the estimate that 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 is not a distant forecast but an imminent reality we are neither legally nor logistically prepared to face or tackle.”

PULL QUOTE: The UN predicts that the recent wave of climate migration is just the beginning. By 2040, the number of countries facing extreme climate hazards is expected to surge from three to 65, creating unprecedented challenges. Without concerted international efforts, the estimate that 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 is not a distant forecast but an imminent reality we are neither legally nor logistically prepared to face or tackle.

During a phone conversation with a member of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the European Parliament and an advisor to MP Erik Marquardt, we learned that the issue of the climate crisis cuts deeper. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they explain that it is often very difficult to draw a line between the cause and the effect of climate change. According to the interviewee, polluters, mostly industrialised countries, are often geographically and politically separate from the victims, mainly in the Global South.

As a solution, they called for a rethinking of cross-border responsibilities. “It is time to establish a new thinking around human rights when the perpetrator is in one place and the victim in another place, and a third member state is also involved,” they concluded. “And at the same time, not to make this a colonial narrative, but also not completely disregard the actual wrongdoings of industrialisation, which then leads to people having to move.”

How many climate migrants will it take?

Today, Hassan works as an electrician in Naples while pursuing his university studies. Alongside a group of fellow migrants, he helps young people from Africa who aspire to come to Europe. “We do it because we know that climate and war have put an end to so many opportunities,” he says.

The UN predicts that the recent wave of climate migration is just the beginning. By 2040, the number of countries facing extreme climate hazards is expected to surge from three to 65, creating unprecedented challenges. Without concerted international efforts, the estimate that 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 is not a distant forecast but an imminent reality we are neither legally nor logistically prepared to face or tackle.

The stories of Hassan, Mehran, Gulzar, Umer, and many others reveal the sobering reality and human toll of climate change, conflict, and poverty. They pose a pressing question: How long will it take for governments to recognise climate migrants?

As climate change accelerates, the lack of adaptation options in many parts of the world is forcing people to make impossible choices. “The changes due to climate change are so rapid that people can’t adapt to them in time,” explains Gabriela Nagle Alverio. And as the climate crisis deepens, it’s the world’s most vulnerable who bear the brunt. Their stories urgently call for policy reforms within the EU and international protections that recognise the reality of these individuals. As the Global North watches in silence, the cost of inaction is unthinkable.