The Growing Urgency for Asylum Framework to Adapt to Climate Change Migration

Writer: Abigail Vinces

Article Editor: Will Purser

I. Introduction

Historically, public policy addressing climate change through government restrictions on the private sector can be seen with the Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and more.¹ Current legislation, however, does not sufficiently address the topic of human rights in relation to climate change, specifically in regard to migration as an effect of climate change. Norman Myers, an early scholar on climate migration, identified the growing problem of climate refugees and the impact of climate change on migration.² In his 1997 paper, Environmental Refugees, Myers noted that “there are at least 25 million ‘environmental refugees’.”³ Despite this figure being nearly three decades old, the issue remains unaddressed as climate concerns have only grown in magnitude. Myers’s predictions for the future impacts of climate change included damage to agriculture, water shortages, deforestation, and desertification.⁴ These are causes for unemployment, poverty, and the destruction of livelihood in homelands.⁵ Additionally, Myers predicted that these effects would disproportionately affect certain parts of the world and certain societies that are less equipped to handle climate-induced phenomena.⁶ This growing risk of displacement has indicated that there will soon be an increase in the number of refugees seeking asylum, particularly in the United States. Despite there being some scholarly discussion about how to address the potential increase of climate migration, the current asylum frameworks in the U.S. are not well suited to address the growing threat of climate migration and urgently need to be adapted. 

II. Climate Change Effects on Social Structure

The displacement of individuals in locations that have experienced severe weather events and rising global temperatures that have detrimentally changed its landscape is expected to destabilize the social institutions and structure of these communities and regions. The climate changes that Meyers predicts will displace so many climate refugees have been observed by some scholars already. For example, frequent disasters caused by the rising temperatures, including “heat waves, floods, and droughts,” are increasing the risks that human hazards, livelihoods, communities, and infrastructure already face.⁷ High costs for reparations of the effects of climate change make it difficult for communities to keep up since the rate of climate change is continual. Another social effect mentioned in scholarly literature is that regional climate change may vary from global averages. It follows that some regions would be more vulnerable to climatic changes than others. Additionally, “nations…vary greatly in their ability to cope and adapt to a changing climate.”⁸

Certain countries are at a more vulnerable position when it comes to climate related disasters because of the lack of political, economic, and legal structures needed to address the risk and damage.⁹ Research done by the International Monetary Fund found that small developing states and low income developing countries have the lowest levels of climate resilience necessary to address climate disasters.¹⁰ The small developing states in this study were mostly island and coastal states because they face some of the greatest climate risks due to their geographic placement and their exposure to sea level rise.¹¹ The United States can expect to receive climate migration because our social, economic, legal, etc., structures are less susceptible to the damages of climate disasters. The University of Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative ranks the United States in eighteenth place for climate readiness with a readiness score of 0.641 out of 1 amongst the 192 countries surveyed.¹² The effects that climate change has on communities can be expected to necessitate that individuals in these communities seek other homes and migrate for their family and their own well-being. However, current frameworks in the United States for asylum refugees have not taken climate migrants into enough consideration to adapt. 

III. How Climate Migration Has Been Addressed & Current Asylum Framework

As of yet, the term “climate refugee” has not been well established in U.S. legal precedent to protect the rights of foreign and domestic individuals who have the necessity to flee their homes due to climate change. U.S. courts have already been faced with some of the challenges that will come from climate change in terms of its effects on asylum seekers. Cruz Galicia v. Garland (2024) is a case in which a Guatemalan family was denied asylum in the U.S. because they were seeking refuge from the detrimental effects of climate change on their home country. The Galicia family reported the malnutrition crisis occurring in Guatemala due to the increasingly extreme droughts and storms.¹³ The current asylum framework grants asylum to individuals who are unable to return to their home country due to past persecution or a well founded fear of “persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”¹⁴ These are the conditions that Roni Cruz Galicia and his family were unable to meet when they applied for asylum and were denied. Galicia and his family sought asylum “on the basis of climate-change related drought and natural disasters.”¹⁵ The effects of climate change on Guatemala as a country were described by the petitioners to have caused “the epidemic of malnutrition and habitable land,” and as a result, the family felt that they needed to leave to preserve their livelihood.¹⁶ As the petitioners, Galicia tried to argue that they belonged to a “particular group” of “‘climate refugees.’”¹⁷ However, the First Circuit Court of Appeals denied the petition on the grounds that Galicia and his family did not “experience sufficient harm…to constitute past persecution.”¹⁸ The inability for the Galicia family to meet this qualification for asylum did not accurately assess their true need for asylum in the United States. This is a demonstration of the ways in which the current asylum framework in the U.S. is not adequately suited to fit the needs of climate refugees.

The Trump administration has been cracking down on immigration for the past year, and the asylum framework has continued to tighten up since then. Chris Landau, Deputy Secretary of State, announced the Trump administration’s proposal to make refugee status temporary rather than permanent.¹⁹ The Trump administration has also been encouraging other U.N. nations to approach asylum and refugee governance in the same way as the United States. The approach taken by the Trump administration has been to largely “zero-out” refugee resettlements in the United States.²⁰ These growing restrictions on current refugee systems demonstrate that adapting the asylum framework in the U.S. to include climate refugees would likely prove to be difficult. Additionally, the consensus for adding greater restrictions to asylum frameworks has spread to other nations in the U.N., which can pose a great risk to individuals who will choose to seek asylum from their home nations affected by climate change. 

IV. Reworked Asylum Framework for Climate Refugees

The United States has been tightening restrictions on asylum framework and immigration policies in recent years. There have been proposals for legal adaptations in the asylum and immigration framework, advocated by humanitarian intervention experts, that would correctly accommodate the potential climate refugees that are predicted to increase. 

One such asylum framework adaptation that has been proposed is climate humanitarian visas (CHV).²¹ Denise Margaret Matias, a professor at the Eberswald University in Germany, proposed CHVs for individuals who need to migrate because of climate disasters. Matias’s proposed addition of climate visas to the asylum framework is an international humanitarian migration opportunity modeled in accordance with “cosmopolitanism,” which “treats all humans as part of one moral community.”²² CHV’s would function similarly to some current “soft-law,” such as the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and Platform on Disaster Displacement.²³ Initiating CHVs as a soft law would move forward the advancement of adapting the migration frameworks to see granting visas to climate refugees as necessary humanitarian aid. As CHVs are more normalized, states could potentially move forward with “climate passports” when and if the climate crisis drives the necessity for them.²⁴ The CHV proposal from Matias offers a viable framework within which asylum frameworks for climate migration can be implemented in the United States. 

V. Conclusion

The continuous climate change on the Earth will only increase the need for a structure in the asylum framework of the U.S. to be adapted to fit the humanitarian needs of asylum seekers. As a country that has lower vulnerability due to the high income, literacy, governance, and public services, the United States will likely receive asylum seekers, and an adapted asylum framework will be very necessary to aid in handling the future influx.²⁵ CruzGalicia v. Garland (2024) is an early insight into the future need for adaptations to immigration policy to meet the needs of climate refugees. The most urgent need at this point, though, is to call the issue to the attention of legislators and be acknowledged as a problem that will need to be addressed soon. Whether it looks like climate humanitarian visas or setting new legal precedent in the courts, there needs to be a shift in perspective on the necessity of an adapted asylum framework in the U.S. 

1. Robert Meltz, Climate Change Litigation: A Growing Phenomenon (2015). ↩︎
2. Norman Myers, Environmental Refugees, 19 Population & Env’t 167 (1997). ↩︎
3. Id. at 167. ↩︎
4. Id. at 169–70. ↩︎
5. Id. at 171. ↩︎
6. Id. at 168. ↩︎
7. Linpei Zhai & Jae-Eun Lee, Investigating Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Resilience: A Comprehensive Review within the Context of Climate Change, 15 Atmosphere 474 (2024). ↩︎
8. Stephen L. Baird, Climate Change: A Runaway Train, 66 The Tech. Teacher 14 (2007). ↩︎
9. Shelby Negosian, Climate Refugees, Environmental and Immigration Law Under the Trump Administration, The Asylumist (Apr. 2025). ↩︎
10. Johanna Tiedemann et al., Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals in Small Developing States withClimate Vulnerabilities: Cost and Financing (Int’l Monetary Fund, Working Paper No. 21/62, 2021). ↩︎
11. Id. at 17. ↩︎
12. U. of Notre Dame Glob. Adaptation Initiative, ND-GAIN Country Index: Rankings (2023). ↩︎
13. Cruz Galicia v. Garland, 106 F.4th 141 (1st. Cir. 2024). ↩︎
14. Id. ↩︎
15. Sanjana Kumar, Reframing Refuge from Persecution: The Right to a Stable Climate, 4 Prin. L. J. (2025) ↩︎
16. Id. ↩︎
17. Id. ↩︎
18. Id. ↩︎
19. Adam Taylor, U.S. Official Outlines Plan to Alter Global Asylum System, Wash. Post (Sept. 2025). ↩︎
20. Id. ↩︎
21. Denise Margaret S. Matias, Climate Humanitarian Visa: International Migration Opportunities as Post-Disaster Humanitarian Intervention, 160 Climatic Change 143 (2020). ↩︎
22. Id. at 149. ↩︎
23. Id. at 152. ↩︎
24. Id. at 152. ↩︎
25. Samuel Fankhauser & Thomas K.J. McDermott, Understanding the Adaptation Deficit: Why are Poor Countries More Vulnerable to Climate Events than Rich Countries?, 27 Glob. Env’t Change 9 (2014). ↩︎