Climate change is displacing millions and creating legal vacuums that extremist movements exploit. The absence of legal protections for climate-displaced people fuels a dangerous cycle, from irregular migration to anti-immigrant violence. To address this, policymakers should prioritize creating legal pathways for climate mobility.
By 2050, climate impacts like water scarcity, failing crops, and rising sea levels could displace 216 million people within their own countries, in addition to those who cross borders. People who move without legal protection become vulnerable to criminal exploitation and extremist political movements. Leaving them in precarious legal positions not only fails them but also creates the conditions for political violence.
The reinforcing cycle
Across different regions and political contexts, a cycle links climate stress, unprotected migration, and political extremism. Climate stress undermines governance: when states cannot provide water, food and basic services, people move. Without legal pathways, that movement becomes irregular. And irregular migration becomes the fodder for extremist narratives about invasion, chaos, and civilizational threat that radicalize individuals and recruit others.
In the Horn of Africa, Al-Shabaab has exploited drought conditions to recruit among displaced populations, distributing food and water where the state cannot and positioning itself as an alternative government. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS systematically controlled water infrastructure, diverting rivers, flooding villages, and selling water back to desperate populations. In fact, a global analysis found that water-related terrorism increased more than threefold from 1970 to 2016.
The legal gap is being weaponized
What makes this cycle so dangerous is the legal void at its center. International law still does not recognize climate-displaced people as a protected category. The 1951 Refugee Convention was not designed for environmental degradation or natural disasters, and no binding instrument has filled the gap. This means that people fleeing climate impacts are pushed into the same irregular channels as other undocumented migrants, exposed to smuggling networks, labor exploitation, detention, and deportation.
A patchwork of partial protection measures exists, but its unevenness is the clearest evidence of the gap. The Kampala Convention binds African states to protect people displaced internally by disasters, including climate change, but its protections stop at national borders. Similarly, the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty created the world’s first bilateral climate mobility pathway, though for only 280 people per year from a single country.
Domestic litigation related to climate displacement is rising, but each victory applies only within the jurisdiction that issued it. Scholars have long documented why nothing more comprehensive has yet emerged: most movement blurs the line between voluntary and forced migration, making litigation and policy definitions politically elusive. Ultimately, efforts to expand protections remain politically contested and slow, leaving millions without protection on paper and even more without protection in practice.
This ‘legal limbo’ harms migrants and hands political ammunition to political actors seeking to keep them out. Without clear protection frameworks, every climate-displaced person who arrives through irregular channels becomes “evidence” for those who frame migration as a crisis to be stopped.
This distinction matters because the legal gap can be exploited by both criminal and extremist actors. Criminal smugglers exploit desperation, extremist parties build power on anti-immigrant platforms, and terrorist groups recruit from displaced populations. The absence of legal pathways for climate mobility increases reliance on irregular channels, which then feeds the very narratives that block protection.
Green on the outside
At the same time, extremist groups are adopting environmental language itself as a justification. Roughly one in five survey respondents in the UK agreed with eco-fascist ideology: the belief that immigration constitutes a form of environmental destruction and that violent action against immigrants is justified to protect the nation’s ecological purity.
The survey items were drawn directly from the Christchurch attacker’s manifesto, which framed immigration as ‘environmental warfare’. However, those same respondents did not score high on environmental concern or identify as environmentalists. Researchers describe this as ‘avocado politics’: green on the outside but far-right on the inside, where environmental concerns are a convenient wrapper for pre-existing ethno-nationalist and authoritarian commitments.
In fact, the attackers in El Paso and Christchurch both invoked ecological sustainability to justify mass murder of immigrants. In 2019, the Christchurch attacker declared himself an ecofascist in a manifesto that cast immigration as an ecological threat and killed 51 people. Five months later, the El Paso attacker, who named Christchurch as his model, killed 23 people and justified the attack as a defense against environmental degradation that he attributed to immigration.
Researchers describe the two manifestos as reframing racial exclusion as environmental salvation that treats migration as an environmental threat rather than a predictable human response to environmental change.
The middle of that continuum is where the danger concentrates. A 2025 survey experiment of nearly 2,000 UK residents found that climate despair and a sense of social breakdown, combined with authoritarian and social-dominance predispositions, significantly increase susceptibility to ecofascist ideas, suggesting that the climate crisis may be widening the pool of people such movements can reach.
Closing the gap
Policymakers should prioritize expanding legal pathways for those affected by climate change. Creating regular pathways for climate mobility reduces the reliance on irregular channels that extremist rhetoric can exploit and transforms migration into a governed process. The Kampala Convention and the Falepili Union Treaty show that binding frameworks are achievable, but they remain unique exceptions rather than common practice.
Until such frameworks exist, strategic litigation can be leveraged to expand the patchwork of protections. A systematic review of climate migration cases across six continents found that no single legal theory delivers comprehensive protection, but that the review finds better outcomes when advocates litigate strategically. Initiatives like the Climate Mobility and Legal Innovation Program now train lawyers, judges, and frontline advocates to deploy these strategies deliberately, so that scattered wins begin to accumulate into a coherent body of protection rather than a list of exceptions.
Investment must also flow to governance. The World Bank’s Groundswell report estimates that concerted climate and development action could reduce internal climate migration by up to 80%.
Finally, the narrative itself is a lever, as experimental research finds that dehumanizing language about immigrants measurably increases support for restrictive policy through anger and disgust. Surveys in the United States and Germany find that the public already views climate migrants as more deserving than economic migrants, precisely because their movement is understood as involuntary.
Migration has been one way humans adapt to environmental change. The question now is whether governments build the legal and institutional frameworks to make it safe, orderly, and productive, or allow their absence to keep feeding the extremism those same governments claim to oppose.
This blog piece is part of a special series launched in the context of the work that Global Development Network (GDN) is carrying out in close partnership with the Center for Systems Solutions, and Future Earth US global hub, in support of the Belmont Forum’s Collaborative Research Action (CRA) on Integrated Approaches to Human Migration/Mobility.
