Dr. Chiara
Scissa, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Bologna
Photo: 2026 forest fires in Fontainebleu, by Jdkxhdjj, via Wikimedia
Commons
New book: Disaster Displacement and International Protection in the
EU. Challenges, Misconceptions, and the Way Forward (Routledge,
2026)
Disasters trigger over three
times more displacements than conflict and violence and rank among the
principal drivers of displacement worldwide. Whereas other world’s regions have
reached significant achievements – including Africa with the IGAD
Protocol on Free Movement of Persons recognizing free
movement for IGAD citizens affected by disasters, Latin America with the 2025
Inter-American Court on Human Rights’ Advisory Opinion
acknowledging the applicability of international protection in disaster
contexts, and the Pacific with relevant regional and bilateral
initiatives on climate mobility -, this is not the case for the European Union
(EU). The EU lags behind with no common protection avenue for people displaced
across borders in the context of disasters, and with only three Member States -
Italy, Cyprus, and Finland – that currently offer an explicit provision to that
effect.
In this book, I interrogate the asymmetry between the magnitude of the
phenomenon and the poverty of the legal response in the EU, and argue that the
protection gap is not attributable to a lacuna in positive law, but to
the defective application and interpretation of norms already in force and
restrictive asylum policies. The right path to follow would, in my opinion, not
lie in the codification of a new status for the so-called “climate refugees”, a
category I do not endorse, but the principled, evolutive application and
interpretation of existing norms that already bind the Union and its Member
States.
Central to the book is the identification of three compounding
challenges that have so far contributed to hindering the recognition of
protection in the context of disaster displacement in the EU: 1) the
misconceptualization of disasters in legal and policy instruments; the rigid
application and (sometimes controversial) interpretation of international
protection norms; and 3) the deterrence paradigm increasingly endorsed by the
EU and its Member States to curb access to asylum.
The first challenge: Misconceptualization of disasters.
A first major challenge, which is persistently present in relevant legal
and operational EU disaster frameworks from the very outset to the latest
developments in this area, concerns the reference to “natural disasters” as
part of the definition. This formulation does not only contradict scientific
evidence and established scholarly work in the field of disaster studies,
according to which disasters are the product of hazards in combination with the
social environment in which they unfold, but also undermines asylum claims
based on, or associated with, disaster displacement. Indeed, where a disaster
is perceived as something purely natural, and hence beyond human control, it
risks creating a fictitious separation between situations attributable to human
actions and those perceived as naturally occurring. Seen as the manifestations
of the uncontrollable forces of nature, disasters can therefore hardly fall
within the net of protection. Likewise, the attribution of State’s
responsibility in disaster contexts, and the related failure to protect, is hardly
explored.
The second challenge: Misinterpretation of refugee law tenets.
Closely related to the misconceptualization of disasters is the second
identified challenge, namely the issue of rigid, and sometimes controversial,
application and interpretation of international protection norms in the context
of disaster displacement. From a careful and in-depth literature review and
case law analysis, available in Chapter 2, what stems is that disaster-related
asylum claims have been often, and hastily, dismissed. Respectively, refugee
status is denied in this context on some recurring grounds: disasters do not
amount to persecution; they disclose no nexus to a Convention ground; they do
not discriminate and produce no individual harm; they cannot constitute actors
of persecution; and have no intention to persecute. These propositions recur in
the Commission’s own documents (2013; 2022) and in
the jurisprudence of the Member States. As for subsidiary protection, this is
frequently set aside due to the fact that the harm stemming from disasters is
not explicitly listed among the components of serious harm pursuant to Article
15 of the Qualification Directive (now Qualification Regulation). In addition,
the requirement for serious harm to stem from an intentional act or
omission, which was first coined by the EU Court of Justice in M’Bodj (2014)
but has no place either in EU asylum law or in the 1951 Refugee Convention, has
already led national asylum judges to dismiss subsidiary protection claims. In Italy
and France, for example, the combination of misconceptions surrounding the
notion of disasters and challenges in applying a principled interpretation of
serious harm led national courts to swiftly dismiss disaster
displacement-related claims, reserving short paragraphs or even just one
sentence of their judicial analysis to explain the exclusion of disaster
displacement from subsidiary protection.
Finally, the book looks at the internal protection alternative (IPA) for
people displaced in the context of disasters as a further protection tenet
subject to fragmented and inconsistent practices among the Member States. In Austria, the
relevance of disasters in the IPA assessment seems to depend on the claimant’s
country of origin and the judge adjudicating the case instead of the severity
of the disaster and its human rights implications on the applicant. In Nordic
countries, disasters seem to have almost never been taken into account by
competent authorities in the context of an IPA assessment. Hence, disasters’
integration into the IPA assessment is far from being standardized in the EU,
which means that the decision on the availability of internal relocation in the
claimant’s country of origin is a bit of a lottery with severe repercussions on
asylum seekers coming from disaster-prone countries.
The third challenge: the logic of deterrence.
Before
actually writing the book, in that phase where concepts and words are
chaotically appearing on paper together with some random arrows in the attempt
to make sense of everything, I realized that the first two challenges identified
showed why disaster displacement is hardly recognized as a legitimate ground
for protection. But that was the last stage of a complicated and often
incomplete process. Actually, for people displaced in the context of disasters,
it is extremely hard to even reach and get the chance to stay in the territory
of the EU Member States to seek protection. This is because disasters
themselves can hinder people’s arrival at destination. This is the case of thousands
of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea in the attempt to reach Italy, who
have drowned because of extreme weather events, including storms and cyclones. Likewise,
asylum seekers attempting to reach the EU through the Balkan route are exposed
to drowning in rivers as well as to freezing temperatures along the way and extreme
cold weather deaths from hypothermia. In doing so, disasters can interact with
deterrence policies preventing arrivals. Italy’s efforts to stop
disembarkations in addition to disasters, which make the sea crossing perilous
and relief operations unfeasible, claimed the life of 380
people in January 2026.
At the same time, disasters can interact with deterrence policies aimed at
curbing access to the asylum procedure.
The book presents emblematic examples of EU-led deterrence policies and
how they interact with disasters following Gammeltoft-Hansen
and Tan’s categorization. These include development cooperation, accelerated
procedures based on the safe country notion, and externalization agreements.
All these examples corroborate that deterrence makes it harder, if not totally
unlikely, not only for disasters to be recognized, but even identified
as a cause of displacement. On the contrary, deterrence policies are
contributing to perpetuating its invisibility in asylum adjudication. Indeed,
the result of ongoing, and progressively more restrictive, asylum policies at
the Union and national levels is the continued lack of attention toward
disaster displacement in asylum adjudication, thus making their exclusion from
protection a persistent issue.
Concluding remarks.
My aim
with this book is twofold and only time will tell me if I somehow managed to
get closer to it. On the one hand, I hope to make more students interested in
this topic, which fascinates me and deserves further attention, especially from
young and fresh minds. On the other hand, I sincerely hope this book will reach
in one way or another policymakers and decisionmakers across the world, and
especially in the EU, as all the described challenges have to do with decisions
made at the political and judicial level. This book explains why the persistent
use of the term “natural disaster” in legal texts should be definitely
abandoned, describes the risks associated with superficial asylum adjudication,
and warns against the alarming combination of disasters with deterrence
policies for people seeking protection. May those entrusted with making,
enforcing, and interpreting the law find meaningful insight within these pages
- ever mindful that abstract policy carries concrete, and often indelible,
consequences for human lives.
Download
the open-access version here.
Purchase
a hard copy here.
