Our climate is getting warmer and climate change is increasingly affecting environmental
degradation. Droughts, floods, rising sea levels and other natural disasters are forcing
individuals as well as entire communities to displace inside and outside the state borders. Legal
status of environmentally displaced persons is thus becoming an increasingly pressing problem
for the international community. Despite the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change drew attention to the impact of climate change on migration as early as 1990, there is
still a legal gap in this area today. How to address this legal gap is the subject of many
discussions, which however, do not yield effective results. In my master's thesis, I focus on the
outline of the existing legal framework and the protection of environmentally displaced persons
that it offers, and I also present the possibility of a progressive interpretation of the said existing
legal framework. I focus mainly on recent efforts by individual countries, as well as by
international organizations and agencies, to address environmentally displaced persons and
comment on their success. In the last chapter, I look at the matter from a human rights law
perspective.
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