Climate Change, Disasters, and the Refugee Convention Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies Series

Climate Change, Disasters and the Refugee Convention is concerned with refugee status determination (RSD) in the context of disasters and climate change. It demonstrates that the legal predicament of people who seek refugee status in this connection has been inconsistently addressed by judicial bodies in leading refugee law jurisdictions, and identifies epistemological as well as doctrinal impediments to a clear and principled application of international refugee law. Arguing that RSD cannot safely be performed without a clear understanding of the relationship between natural hazards and human agency, the book draws insights from disaster anthropology and political ecology that see discrimination as a contributory cause of people's differential exposure and vulnerability to disaster-related harm. This theoretical framework, combined with insights derived from the review of existing doctrinal and judicial approaches, prompts a critical revision of the dominant human rights-based approach to the refugee definition.

1. Introduction; 2. Two disaster paradigms; 3. Jurisprudence on RSD in the context of 'natural' disasters and climate change; 4. Interpreting the refugee definition; 5. The temporal scope of being persecuted; 6. The personal scope of being persecuted: the function of the non-discrimination norm within the refugee definition; 7. Refugee status determination in the context of 'natural' disasters and climate change; Appendix 1. Taxonomy.

Matthew Scott heads the People on the Move thematic area at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Sweden, where he leads research and educational initiatives relating to human rights, disasters and displacement in Asia and the Pacific, Africa and Europe. He is a solicitor of England and Wales and practised asylum and immigration law before entering academia.