People may be fleeing catastrophic events in their home countries. When preparing now a lecture on medical consequences of the climate crisis ( based on the 2019 Lancet Report ) I found an intriguing piece at the UNHCR website.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, there were 18.8 million new disaster-related internal displacements already in 2017. Displacement across borders also occurs, and may be interrelated with situations of conflict or violence. From the legal side, however, there are no “climate refugees”, as a refugee is defined as a person who has crossed an international border
owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion
The full document is at https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/5906e0824.pdf. The definition of a refugee certainly requires an immediate update including also climate related events.
Update Jan 22, 2019
A Kiribati man now changed the opinion of the UN being accepted as an environmental migrant.