How Climate Crisis is Redefining Home, and Who Counts as a Refugee

This article was originally published in 360info under Creative Commons 4.0 International. Read the original article.

By Soumyajit Bhar

Every June, around World Refugee Day, the United Nations refugee agency releases Global Trends, its annual account of forced displacement.

We have just crossed another World Refugee Day, and the figure remains unthinkable: 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2025. That is one in every 70 people on earth. Although this was the first decline in a decade, displacement remains almost twice as high as it was ten years ago.

These numbers trend briefly, generate familiar humanitarian narratives about resilience and hope, and then recede. What remains largely unexamined is the deeper question they force on us: what kind of world produces nearly 118 million people without homes? And what does it mean when displacement is no longer an emergency, but a permanent condition for entire populations?

The standard answer is conflict. Wars produce refugees. But this framing, however real, obscures far more than it reveals. Conflict is only one strand in a larger architecture of displacement that contemporary development has constructed and continues to expand. Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Myanmar and Palestine remain among the major centres of forced displacement.

Most people who flee across borders stay close to home: Chad hosts more than a million: Sudanese refugees, and Egypt has received over a million people fleeing Sudan’s war. Meanwhile, Iran and Pakistan have long hosted most Afghan refugees. More broadly, most refugees globally are hosted by  low- and middle-income countries that are already stretched thin. The burden falls, with extraordinary precision, on those who have contributed least to the conditions generating it. This is structural.

The World Refugee Day this year came against the backdrop of a finding by a United Nations Human Rights Council-mandated Commission of Inquiry that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Three days after World Refugee Day, the Commission issued a second report finding that Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children amounted to genocide, alongside crimes against humanity and war crimes. Israel has rejected these findings.

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Gaza has now become one of the clearest contemporary examples of displacement as a political condition, where almost an entire population has been repeatedly pushed through shrinking zones of survival.

Yet the emerging geography of forced movement is shaped not by conflict alone.

Climate change is becoming an increasingly important driver. According to the World Bank’s Groundswell report, as many as 216 million people could be internally displaced by climate change by 2050.

Sea-level rise, drought, desertification and ecological collapse are already making landscapes uninhabitable. Yet climate displacement is rarely discussed as a refugee crisis. It gets euphemised as “environmental migration” or “adaptation” — language that sanitizes growth-centred development, fossil fuel dependence and unequal ecological risk.

India offers one of the starkest illustrations. Islands in the Sundarbans, including the once-inhabited Lohachara, have already disappeared amid erosion and rising waters. Ghoramara has lost nearly half its area in the past two decades, and its population has fallen sharply as erosion transforms everyday life. Across the wider Sundarbans delta, fishers face increasing insecurity around traditional fishing grounds; research on the Bangladesh side shows that salinisation threatens  fish habitats and the poor communities that depend on them.

Climate change is not a future projection here. It is the slow withdrawal of home.

Climate, however, is only one face of displacement in India. Experts estimate that, since independence, between 60 and 70 million people have been displaced by development projects alone — dams, mines, highways, industrial corridors and urban expansion.

The Sardar Sarovar Dam  alone has displaced thousands of families in the Narmada Valley while promising electricity and irrigation. Across North Bengal, recurrent floods and riverbank erosion enact a slower violence, while the 2023 Teesta Glacial Lake Outburst Flood suddenly displaced over 7600 people.

Development has always produced displacement. We have simply chosen not to recognize it as such. When a dam floods a valley, electricity flows to cities; the displaced remain in relief camps. When a coastline erodes, the wealthy purchase elevation and mobility; the poor negotiate with a receding world.

Development functions not only as an economic model, but also as an aspirational architecture — a promise that security, mobility and dignity can be achieved through accumulation, infrastructure and control over uncertainty. For newly urbanizing populations across the Global South, development carries the weight of historical dignity claims after centuries of colonial exclusion.

The tragedy is that this promise is tied to ways of living that consume enormous amounts of land, energy and materials. In the process, those who cannot afford this model are often made to bear its costs — and sometimes lose their homes altogether.

What distinguishes contemporary displacement from earlier forms is its relationship to time. Refugees have historically imagined their return — after war ends, after regimes change, after time heals rupture. Climate displacement offers a more brutal calculus. If your island sinks, if your river dries permanently, if your forest burns irreversibly, return is impossible. You are displaced not merely from place, but from time itself.

Increasingly, displacement is experienced before migration occurs. Entire communities now live inside anticipatory displacement — the uncertainty that environments may become unliveable, livelihoods unsustainable and futures politically unstable. 

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When borders harden

As displacement accelerates, borders harden. Nation-states respond not through hospitality but through fortification — walls, camps, detention systems and militarized frontiers. What emerges globally is a form of inverted quarantine: affluent societies insulating themselves from ecological and geopolitical instability while vulnerable populations remain exposed.

The international system designed to manage displacement has not kept pace. The UN Security Council remains paralyzed by great power rivalry. Climate negotiations produce weak agreements. The 1951 Refugee Convention was written when climate migration was not a legal category and development-induced displacement had little recognition. Burden-sharing has too often become a euphemism for containing displaced populations in countries already hosting millions, while wealthy nations tighten their own borders.

On World Refugee Day, stories are often told of resilience — of refugees who rebuilt, contributed and refused to be defined by displacement. These stories matter and they are true. But they also obscure the larger question around the kind of global system that produces displaced people, trends toward hundreds of millions of climate migrants, and continues expanding the developmental model driving both.

Unless we begin asking different questions — not how to better manage the displaced, but how to transform the systems producing displacement — institutions will remain structurally incapable of responding to what they have helped generate. The politics of displacement is no longer only about refugees crossing borders. It is about borders, development and ecological breakdown producing a world in which home itself becomes increasingly impossible.

[KS]

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