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Who Are Climate Refugees?

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A. Climate refugees are people forced to leave their homes and communities because of climate change and global warming.

▲ People displaced by a climate disaster, forced to leave everything behind.Source: The Nation

The term gained wide recognition after 1985, when Essam El-Hinnawi, an expert at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), defined "environmental refugees" as people "who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption."

Take Hurricane Eta, which tore through Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in November 2020. Torrential rain and landslides destroyed homes and livelihoods, and clean drinking water simply ran out. With nowhere left to turn, people crossed into Mexico, and many kept going all the way to the United States. When your home country becomes unlivable, crossing a border stops being a choice and becomes the only way to survive.

Disasters driven by global warming — rising seas, floods, droughts, storms, earthquakes — are pushing the number of climate refugees higher every year. An international research team from the University of Exeter (UK) and Nanjing University (China) warned in the May 2023 issue of Nature Sustainability that, at the current pace, 140 million more people will be exposed to extreme climate conditions for every 0.1°C the planet warms.

▲ Shows how many people live outside the climate "safe zone" as global temperatures rise.Source: Nature Sustainability

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How Many Climate Refugees Are Out There?

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A. Nobody knows the exact number, but international organizations project it could reach 1 billion by 2050.

That estimate comes from the Ecological Threat Register, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) in September 2018. If it turns out to be right, roughly 1 in 10 people on Earth will be a climate refugee by mid-century.

The World Bank reached a similar conclusion in its 2018 report, Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration. Without serious climate action, it warned, more than 140 million people could be forced to migrate within their own countries by 2050.

And this is no longer a distant forecast. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)'s latest report, GRID 2026, the world recorded 62.2 million internal displacements in 2025 alone (down 6% from 2024). Do the math and that's roughly 170,000 people forced from their homes every single day. By the end of 2025, 82.2 million people were living in internal displacement across 104 countries — more than double the 38.9 million recorded in 2016, and roughly on par with the entire population of Germany. Still, that's down from 2024's record high of 83.5 million — the first decline in a decade.

▲ Global internal displacement rose from 38.9 million in 2016 to a record 83.5 million in 2024, then eased slightly to 82.2 million in 2025 — the first drop in a decade.Source: IDMC, GRID 2026

But the 2025 data contains the most significant reversal in the report's history. Of the 62.2 million displacements recorded, conflict and violence triggered a record 32.3 million — up 60% from 2024 — surpassing disaster displacements (29.9 million, down 35%) for the first time on record. Not once since IDMC began tracking this data has conflict displaced more people than disasters — until now. Iran and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) alone each accounted for roughly a third of the global conflict total.

▲ In 2025, conflict and violence displacements (32.3 million) surpassed disaster displacements (29.9 million) for the first time on record.Source: IDMC, GRID 2026

The regional picture couldn't be more different from place to place. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most affected, with 31.7 million people living in displacement (about 40% of the global total) — though new displacement there actually fell for the first time in a decade. East Asia and the Pacific tells the opposite story: powerful typhoons tearing through the Philippines, China, and Indonesia drove 19.6 million displacements — the highest since 2010 — roughly double the population of Seoul, uprooted by storms in a single year. South Asia saw disaster displacements halve to 4.6 million amid a milder monsoon season, even as conflict displacements surged nearly 49-fold to 548,000 due to escalating fighting along Pakistan's border. Same planet, wildly different years.

▲ Sub-Saharan Africa leads with 31.7 million cumulative IDPs (40% of the global total) but saw its first decline, while East Asia & Pacific recorded its highest typhoon-driven total (19.6 million) since 2010. South Asia holds 14.0 million cumulative IDPs; Europe & Central Asia holds 5.9 million.Source: IDMC, GRID 2026

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What Causes Climate Refugees?

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The root cause behind climate refugees is global warming, driven by human activity that harms the planet. Climate change brings droughts, floods, storms, and rising seas, which in turn cause failed harvests, food shortages, and shifting ecosystems. In 2022, 98% of climate refugees were displaced by disasters tied directly to climate change — floods, droughts, and wildfires.

Floods

In just one year, an estimated 19.22 million people were displaced by flooding — six out of every ten climate refugees. A persistent La Niña pattern, which cools the eastern Pacific by more than half a degree Celsius, has driven massive flooding in Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil in recent years.

Drought

On the other side of the world, drought is doing the same damage. In Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, six straight rainy seasons brought almost no rain, forcing around 2.2 million people from their homes.

Rising Sea Levels

Melting glaciers and ice sheets are pushing sea levels higher. That raises the risk to coastal communities, accelerates erosion, and could permanently submerge some islands and low-lying areas — leaving residents no choice but to move.

▲ A low-lying Pacific island community threatened by rising seas.Source: CLIMATE.GOV.KI

In Fiji, Tuvalu, and Kiribati, rising seas threaten to submerge entire nations — putting most of their citizens at risk of becoming climate refugees.

Food Shortages

Climate change also hits crop yields directly. Changing conditions lower productivity and trigger food shortages — a blow that lands hardest on the world's poorest communities and often forces mass migration for survival.

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When Climate Change Fuels War

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Climate risks don't stay in their own lane — they trigger domino effects. According to the UNHCR's Global Trends in Forced Displacement 2020, 95% of all conflict displacement in 2020 occurred in countries that are vulnerable or highly vulnerable to climate change.

Here's how it works: rising temperatures shrink the water supply and degrade water quality. Less water means failed crops, lost income, and food shortages, while contaminated water spreads disease. Add hunger and disease together, and once stable communities start to unravel — and that's exactly where conflict finds room to grow.

Syria is the textbook case. Between 2006 and 2010, once-fertile Syrian farmland turned to desert, crop yields collapsed, and 85% of livestock died. As food prices spiked, some 10,000 rural workers moved to cities looking for work — and the poverty they found there made them easy targets for Islamic State (IS) recruiters.

▲ A screenshot from a promotional video used to recruit Syrian mercenaries.Source: Syrians for Truth and Justice

Climate wasn't the only cause of the Syrian civil war, of course — but the social strain it caused clearly helped push existing tensions over the edge. The result was a conflict that sparked one of the worst refugee crises in decades, forcing roughly 60,000 Syrians — about a sixth of the population — to flee the country.

And Syria isn't alone. Afghanistan, Somalia, Mali, and Yemen are all facing compounding crises as climate risk intensifies in conflict zones. The overlap between "countries most vulnerable to climate change" and "countries experiencing conflict or violence" is strong enough that we need to start treating climate change as a potential seed of international conflict — and act before it takes root.

The 2025 data shows this is no longer just a theory. Conflict displacement is heavily concentrated: Iran and the DRC together account for roughly two-thirds of all global conflict displacement. The trouble is, the more volatile a region gets, the harder it becomes to even measure what's happening there. In 2025, 15% of monitored countries saw data availability shrink — three times the share in 2024. In other words, the real scale of the crisis may well be larger than what we can currently see.

▲ Iran and the DR Congo alone accounted for roughly two-thirds of global conflict displacement combined, while 15% of monitored countries saw growing data gaps in 2025 (3x the 2024 share).Source: IDMC, GRID 2026

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How to Help Climate Refugees

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So what can we actually do to help our global neighbors caught up in this crisis?

"In a sense, climate change is perhaps a war between the rich and the poor.
It's the rich that are deriving the benefits, it's the poor that are paying the price."

- Anote Tong, former President of Kiribati, Sunhak Peace Prize Laureate -

Written by Sharon Choi
Director of Planning, Sunhak Peace Prize Secretariat