Abstract
In 1985, Egyptian researcher Essam El-Hinnawi coined the term “environmental for the United Nations Environment Programme Forty later, this status still does not exist in international law. The 1951 Geneva Convention, drafted in the postwar period, recognizes as refugees only those fleeing political, religious, or ethnic persecution. Those forced into exile by rising sea levels, drought, or the destruction of their land have, legally speaking, no refuge.
Yet the phenomenon is nothing new. History is rife with mass displacements linked to environmental upheavals the Great Irish Famine of the , the American Dust Bowl of the , and more recently Hurricane in 2005, which revealed how climate disasters strike the poorest and most vulnerable first. The World Bank now estimates that climate change could force up to 216 people to move within their own countries by 2050.
Faced with this reality, a major contradiction emerges climate policies sometimes encourage mobility as an adaptation strategy, while migration policies seek to restrict it. Who will welcome those whom the Earth exiles Who will welcome those whom our climate irresponsibility exiles What geographical, legal, and moral boundaries are we prepared to redraw
This roundtable, moderated by students from Sorbonne University, brings together the perspectives of historians, political scientists, and legal scholars to examine climate migration in its historical depth and contemporary urgency, and to address the question of hospitality as a political challenge of the XXIst century.
