Climate Exile without Refugeehood: Rethinking Legal Protection for Cross-Border Climate Displacement in South Asia

Abstract

South Asia is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, where glacial melt, extreme flooding, salinity intrusion, sea-level rise, and intensifying heat are already driving large-scale internal displacement and, in specific corridors, increasingly plausible cross-border mobility. Yet cross-border climate-displaced persons remain poorly recognised and weakly protected. Regional engagement with the international refugee regime is uneven: Afghanistan has acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, but several key South Asian states remain non-parties and most do not operate comprehensive asylum systems that translate need into enforceable status and rights. This creates a recurring recognition gap in which movement may occur, but lawful stay, legal personhood, and protection are contingent or withheld, reinforced by global reluctance to expand Convention refugeehood to environmental harm as such. Using the lens of compound uninhabitability, this article argues that climate mobility in South Asia is often neither temporary nor voluntary. The convergence of ecological shocks, territorial degradation, and institutional fragility generates repeated and sometimes functionally irreversible movement, while governance choices, including land policy, infrastructure, and unequal relief and adaptation, can convert climate stress into compelled mobility without a clear convention-ground nexus. The article shows why existing refugee and migration frameworks are ill-suited to climate exile, why non-refoulement and emerging doctrines including climate-induced statelessness remain partial, and why regional legal innovations, including mobility compacts and humanitarian residency pathways, offer the most viable protection route beyond refugeehood.