The international legal framework governing forced migration was finalized in 1951. It was last meaningfully amended in 1967. It was designed to address the displacement of Europeans after a single world war, and it defines a refugee through five specific categories of persecution: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, and political opinion.
None of those categories include climate. None include food-system collapse. None include the slow erosion of habitability. And yet, by the best available conservative projections, the next two decades will produce the largest sustained cross-border and internal displacement in modern history — driven not primarily by persecution as the 1951 framework defines it, but by environmental, agricultural, and demographic pressures the framework does not recognize.
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