Climate-induced Migration and International Law

Assessing the Discursive Legal Construction of Climate Refugees

Abstract

The following research aims to focus on the legal steps taken by the international community in the definition and identification of climate-induced migration.
As an international legal framework is still missing, the challenges posited by environmental changes are often addressed in the decisions adopted by the Conference of the Parties (COP), the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These decisions are used to implement, from a legal perspective, what previous international laws and regulations lack, as is the case with climate-induced migrants. Therefore, a corpus collating the decisions adopted by the COP (spanning from COP3, which took place from 1 to 10 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, to COP23, which was held from 6 to 17 November 2017 in Bonn, Germany) will be analysed by using Corpus Linguistics methodologies. The online corpus analysis platform Sketch Engine will be used to address the discursive construction of the environmental challenges discussed diachronically under the COP decisions. In this way, the following investigation will discuss the complex legal challenges associated with climate change-induced displacement under international law. Additionally, the paper also addresses terminological issues linked to the very definition of people who are forced to be displaced due to climate change-related problems. Therefore, a web-based corpus will be analysed to see how climate-induced migrants are defined and discursively constructed in the online environment.