The 1951 Refugee Convention does not recognize climate displacement. As sea levels rise and droughts intensify, over a billion people face statelessness with no international protection framework.
They have a word for it in Kiribati: te kakerekea. The act of moving backwards, retreating from the encroaching sea. For the people of this Pacific island nation — one of the first countries predicted to be entirely submerged by rising sea levels — it is not a metaphor. It is geography becoming biography.
The Kiribati government purchased 20 square kilometers of land in Fiji in 2014. Not for tourism. As a refuge of last resort for 120,000 citizens who will eventually have nowhere left to go.
They are not alone.
A Protection Gap the Size of a Planet
The international refugee protection framework was designed in 1951 to address the specific horror of post-World War II displacement: people fleeing persecution by their own governments. It is a system built for the last century’s crisis. It is functionally useless for this century’s.
Climate displacement — driven by sea-level rise, extreme drought, catastrophic flooding, and the collapse of agricultural systems — does not trigger protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. A Bangladeshi farmer whose land has been permanently inundated by the Bay of Bengal has no recognized legal claim to asylum in any country. A Somali pastoralist whose livestock died in a drought that climate science directly attributes to industrial emissions has no protected status.
The World Bank’s Groundswell report estimates that without aggressive climate mitigation and adaptation, 216 million people could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre has documented 26.4 million new climate displacements in 2024 alone — more than conflict displacement in the same period.
These are internal refugees. When they cross borders, they become nothing — legally invisible, structurally excluded, and profoundly vulnerable to exploitation.
What Ember’s Anchor Cities Program Is Building
Ember Global doesn’t wait for the framework to catch up. We operate in the gap.
Our Anchor Cities initiative identifies coastal and climate-vulnerable communities — primarily in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines — and works with local governments to create climate-resilient housing zones accessible to displaced populations. These are not refugee camps. They are prefabricated, flood-resistant residential districts designed with community input and connected to economic opportunity.
The first Anchor Cities site in Khulna, Bangladesh, completed Phase I in March 2025: 2,400 housing units, a primary school, two health posts, and a vocational training center for women. Occupancy: 94%. Zero evictions in 12 months.
This is what durable displacement response looks like. Not tents. Not emergency rations for a decade. Permanence. Dignity. Agency.
The Policy Work Running in Parallel
Our field programs generate the data that policy arguments need. We’ve submitted evidence to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees three times since 2022, documenting specific cases of climate-displaced individuals denied protection on the grounds that their flight was not persecution-related.
We co-authored the Cape Town Principles on Climate Mobility alongside eight other organizations in 2024, a framework now being considered as the basis for a supplementary protocol to the 1951 Convention. The road from principle to treaty is measured in decades. We are building the runway.
The Moral Arithmetic
The nations most vulnerable to climate displacement are, almost without exception, the nations least responsible for causing it.
Sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for approximately 3% of cumulative historical carbon emissions. Low-income island nations contribute less than 1%. And yet these communities bear the sharpest edge of the consequences.
This is not misfortune. It is injustice. And naming it as injustice — loudly, persistently, with data — is the first obligation of any institution that claims to serve human welfare.
Ember Global names it. And then we get to work.