On International Migrants Day, states are encouraged to promote awareness about human and fundamental rights of migrants and to advance measures to protect them. In December 2000, the United Nations General Assembly designated 18 December as World Migrants Day to mark the anniversary of the adoption of the “International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families” in 1990.

In recent years, migration and flight have increasingly been addressed in the context of climate change. Climate change is associated with different forms of human mobility, such as labor migration, evacuation, relocation, displacement, circular migration, permanent or short-term migration. However, migration in the context of climate change can also be understood as a means to successfully adapt to a changing environment, e.g., migration as adaptation. Moreover, climate change can not only promote mobility, but also prevent it.

For more than ten years, the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights has been dealing with human rights issues that arise in relation to mobility due to environmental change in the context of climate change. A particular focus is on the question of what legal status people have when they cross international borders in the context of environmental change. The United Nations Migrant Workers Convention mentioned above could provide an answer. However, many European countries, including Austria, have not ratified this convention.

At the moment, the study “ClimMobil: Judicial and policy responses to climate change-related mobility in the European Union with a focus on Austria and Sweden”, funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund, is in progress. For more information about the study click HERE.