Milon didn’t think he was a climate migrant. Leaving in 2016 after going into debt to make the journey, this 20-year-old from Bangladesh took more than a year to arrive in Italy. He followed in the footsteps of many of his compatriots: plane to Libya with a stopover in the Arab Emirates, a few months of work in the North African country and then the boat to Lampedusa. Once there, he applied for asylum. But he had it rejected. When he told the Territorial Commission for International Protection that he feared revenge from loan sharks in case of repatriation, he was told that the reason was not strong enough and was not among those listed in the 1951 Geneva Convention, which regulates the right to asylum.

Milon seemed to be a typical case of an economic migrant, who left to support his family and ended up crushed in a vicious circle of debts impossible to repay. But then the boy showed the lawyer who was following his case a document that changed the course of his case and also his life. It was a certificate in which the Bangladeshi government recognised a small subsidy for the family following the damage caused by the flood that had swept away their house and chicken coop. Milon’s departure had been determined also and above all from that episode: the flood that had hit his home town had deprived his family of the few means of subsistence they had. He recounted it as an accidental but frequent occurrence: for those living in those latitudes, the possibility of an extreme weather event destroying all your possessions is anything but remote.Having observed the document, the lawyer Chiara Maiorano from Sulmona decided to change her strategy and set the rejection appeal on environmental grounds. “Bangladesh is a country prone to persistent floods and typhoons, which are becoming more and more frequent as a result of global warming. And that is how we decided to focus on the climate factor’. A decision that proved successful: on 18 February 2018, the court in L’Aquila upheld the appeal and granted the applicant humanitarian protection. “The interesting thing is that the court took into account several reports that we had attached in support of the argument that Bangladesh is a particularly climate-vulnerable country”1. These include the report on ‘Environmental Crises and Forced Migration’, prepared by the association ‘A sud’².

Milon’s was not the first case of recognition of international protection for climatic reasons. Back in 2015, there had been the case of a Pakistani migrant, Rachid, whose appeal had been accepted by the Court of Bologna on similar grounds. The story is similar: in 2013, a flood had destroyed all his possessions, flooding the land he was cultivating and killing all the animals he was breeding. So he decided to leave and arrived, after a troubled journey, in Italy. Here he followed the asylum application process, which was rejected as unfounded. But in the appeal his lawyer, Alba Ferretti, made the environmental factor count and managed to obtain the recognition of special protection³.

Rachid, like Milon, was unaware that he was a migrant for climatic reasons. Not least because this case is not expressly regulated: environmental causes are not among the causes listed in the Geneva Convention. The text, written and approved during the Cold War, provides for the recognition of the right asylum to those who fear being persecuted in their country of origin mostly on racial, political or religious grounds, or because they are members of a group with their own identity distinct from the majority identity (e.g. belonging to the queer community). Nor is environmental motivation expressly included among the grounds for so-called humanitarian or special protection ⁴. Thus, all cases that are recognised as such are the result of judicial appeals, such as those of Milon and Rachid.

1. _{The case is described in detail in Gilberto Mastromatteo, I primi rifugiati ambientali, RSI, 20 November 2020, https://www.rsi.ch/info/oltre-la-news/I-primi-rifugiati-ambien- tali–1235222.html}
2. _{A sud, Cmca, ‘Environmental crisis and forced migration – 1st ed. The silent wave beyond fortress Europe’, 2016 https://asud.net/risorsa/crisi-ambientale-e-migrazioni-forzate/}
3. _{The case is extensively discussed in Francesca Rosignoli, Environmental Justice for Climate Refugees, Routledge, 2022, https://www.routledge.com/Environmental-Justice-for-Climate-Refugees/Rosignoli/p/book/9780367609450}
4. _{Special protection, a more restrictive version of the former ‘human protection’, is a form of protection complementary to asylum and subsidiary protection, introduced in Italy to allow migrants who arrived from contexts of neither open war nor individual persecution to be able to stay in the country legally. In force for decades, it was abolished in 2018 by the so-called ‘security decrees’ by the then Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, reintroduced in the following government with the Lamorgese Decree of 2020, and then severely depowered by the so-called Cutro Decree 20/2023. See Maurizio Ambrosini, Cosa cambia dopo l’abolizione della protezione speciale, lavoce.info, 18/4/2023, https://lavoce.info/archives/100823/cosa-cambia-dopo-labolizione-della-protezione-speciale/.}

The historic Supreme Court ruling

In this regard, in Italy a particularly relevant ruling issued by the Supreme Court in February 2021. Appealing to the Supreme Court was a citizen of the Niger Delta, a region in southern Nigeria, where oil exploitation has caused significant environmental and social damage. The man had had his asylum application rejected by both the Territorial Commission and the Court of Ancona, to which he had appealed. With the help of lawyer Michelangelo Giugni, he then took the case to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court judges ruled that the applicant’s request was legitimate, recognising that humanitarian/special protection can be obtained in cases of environmental disasters.

In upholding the appeal, the Court stated that the court of merit has the task of assessing the situation in the applicant’s country of origin, “with specific reference to the particular risk to the right to life and dignified existence resulting from environmental degradation, climate change or unsustainable development of the area”, broadening the cases of risks to life compared to those traditionally provided for by the Geneva Convention. “A principle of law has been established out of a normative vacuum,” emphasises Giugni. “The Court of Legitimacy has inaugurated a new jurisprudential orientation that highlights the need to recognise the existence of environmental migrants, in order to turn attention to an organised management of migration, in view of a phenomenon, such as climate change, that is likely to cause major waves of migration.”

Projections speak of an exponential increase in the number of climate-related migrants between now and 2050, with estimates ranging from 250 million to 1.2 billion⁵. Included in this number are internally displaced persons, i.e. migrants who move from one area of a country to another where living conditions are better: since these intra-country movements are difficult to count and currently constitute the majority of cases, it is particularly complex both to take a snapshot of the phenomenon and to make forecasts for the future⁶. Despite the wide gap between the various estimates, all scholars and analysts agree, however, that the environmental factor will increasingly be an element behind migration choices. Among the most exposed countries are the Pacific atolls, the states of the South East Asia such as Bangladesh and Pakistan, the Sahel belt, but also the Mediterranean basin, which is one of the hotspots of the climate crisis, i.e. one of the places where the changes generated by global warming are most noticeable.

The number of climate migrants from countries such as Tunisia and Egypt could increase significantly. These migrations are multi-factorial in nature, in which the element of environmental degradation caused by anthropogenic over-exploitation or the increasingly conspicuous manifestation of global warming may be the primary stimulus to leave, or produce contexts of social or political crisis that may in turn trigger migration projects, both internal and international.

The case of the Tunisian citizen Imed Eddine Jemni, from the city of Gabès, who is the first asylum seeker for environmental reasons in Italy from a Mediterranean country, is exemplary from this point of view. The case, which we had already reported on here⁷, is being examined by the Court of Naples following an appeal against the rejection decision of the Territorial Commission of Caserta. The lawyer who filed it, Jacopo Russo, made explicit reference to the 2021 Supreme Court ruling in the attempt to overturn the rejection of his asylum application.

As Michelangelo Giugni points out, the courts fill a regulatory gap and perform a function that runs counter to the increasing restrictions on the right to asylum introduced by the Italian legislature. Since 2008, the Ministry of the Interior, in agreement with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice, periodically publishes a decree listing the so-called ‘safe third countries’, whose citizens are severely restricted in their ability to apply for political asylum. The new list, published in the official gazette on 7 May 2024, includes countries such as Bangladesh and Egypt (in addition to Tunisia, which had already been on the list for some time), which are among the main states of origin of migrants arriving in Italy and among the countries most affected by the effects of the climate crisis. From this list, asylum seekers such as Imed Eddine Jemli have had their applications for asylum rejected on an accelerated basis.

Those foreign nationals are excluded from the application of the ordinary procedure for international protection, which provides a number of guarantees with respect to the right of defence and the possibility of being regular until the final outcome of the application (on average it takes two years). Those arriving from a country classified as ‘safe’, on the other hand, are subjected to an accelerated procedure that has very short deadlines both for the Territorial Commission and for the possible appeal before the judicial authority. Besides, the appeal does not suspend expulsion: one can be repatriated before the judgement.

This tightening of the law and the restrictions on special protection made by the so-called Cutro Decree 20/2023 may have the paradoxical effect of making the phenomenon of environmental migration more visible. It is foreseeable that the 2021 Supreme Court ruling will be increasingly cited as a source of case law when appealing to suspend deportation and obtain protection status. “Since the Cutro decree makes it more complex to obtain special protection for reasons related to socio-occupational integration, it is not excluded that many appeals will take place for environmental reasons, where these reasons were not relevant before because it was easier to follow the other path,” Giugni confirms.

_{^5. On the different estimates read Simone Tagliapietra, Klaas Lenaerts, Climate migration: what do we really know?, Bruegel, 25 April 2022, https://www.bruegel.org/blog-post/cli- mate-migration-what-do-we-really-know}

_{^6. https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/environmental_migration_and_statistics}

_{^7. https://fieri.it/en/profugo-dalloasi-morente-il-caso-gabes-e-il-dibattito-sulla-migrazio- ne-forzata-per-motivi-ambientali/}

The debate in Europe

While in Italy the debate on possible environmental or climate migrants is at an embryonic level, elsewhere it is much more developed. In October 2023, the Council of Experts on Migration and Integration, an independent body advising the German government, proposed in its annual report to establish a ‘climate passport’, as well as a ‘climate map’ and a ‘climate visa’, with different reception periods. Three instruments that would allow Germany to set an international example to ‘meet the challenge of migration caused by climate change’ ⁸.

In the UK, the discussion is also on the agenda. A think tank linked to the Tories, Onward, considers ‘environmental migrants’ one of the most relevant issues of our time. In a recent report, the organisation points out that ‘in the coming decades environmental degradation, conflict and population growth could trigger a perfect storm capable of producing a mass climate migration’9. The drafters of the report indicate that the country must prepare for this eventuality and act by seeking to support adaptation initiatives abroad to reduce the possibility of migration flows.

The two approaches seem antithetical: the first is based on a principle of environmental justice, the second on the idea of finding a practical solution to a problem that is otherwise destined to explode. Both start from an assumption: that Europe will increasingly be hit by migratory flows from outside caused partly or wholly by environmental or climatic reasons. But what will happen if these movements are intra-European? What will happen if, as some predictive models indicate, large areas of southern Europe or vast coastal areas across the continent become uninhabitable? In the UK there is already the first case of communities being asked to leave their homes for relocation ‘because measures to contain sea-level rise will be increasingly ineffective and costly’. The Welsh village of Fairbourne is set to be flooded and its inhabitants to move within the next thirty years¹⁰. In France, according to a report by Ofxam¹¹, there were 45,000 climate displaced people in 2022 alone, a year marked by devastating fires. In particular, two huge fires in the Gironde department caused the forced displacement of 38,000 people between July and August of that year.

The persistent heat waves, the droughts that affect large areas of the Mediterranean and substantially reduce agricultural profitability, together with the exponential increase in extreme events, show that the effects of the climate crisis can weigh on territories that were thought to be sheltered in the short term, causing consequences that are difficult to predict. On closer inspection, the scenario conjured up by “Qualcosa là fuori” (“Something Out There”), the dystopian science fiction novel by writer Bruno Arpaia¹², which imagines legions of climate refugees leaving Italy for Northern Europe and blocked by barbed wire barriers and armed guards, is perhaps less distant than we think. And the cases of Milon and Rachid fleeing Southeast Asia in the grip of typhoons, as well as that of the Tunisian Imed, may concern us much more than we think.

_{^8. https://www.svr-migration.de/en/press/svr-releases-2023-annual-report/}

_{^9. Forced to move: how to reduce climate migration to the UK, https://www.ukonward. com/reports/forced-to-move-climate-migration/}

_{^10. The UK ‘climate refugees’ who won’t leave, Bbc. 10 maggio 2022, https://www.bbc. com/future/article/20220506-the-uk-climate-refugees-who-wont-leave}

_{^11. https://www.oxfamfrance.org/climat-et-energie/refugies-climatiques-en-france/}

_{^12. Bruno Arpaia, Qualcosa là fuori, Guanda, 2016.}