Climate Displacement and Cultural Survival: Toward Legal Recognition of Collective Cultural Rights in International Migration Governance

Abstract

Climate change is increasingly altering patterns of human mobility through sea-level rise, drought, desertification, extreme weather, ecosystem degradation, and the loss of economically sustainable living conditions. Existing legal debates concerning climate displacement primarily concentrate on refugee status, humanitarian protection, state responsibility, and migration governance. Yet displacement may also cause profound cultural harm by separating communities from ancestral territories, sacred landscapes, traditional livelihoods, linguistic environments, and social institutions essential to collective identity. This article examines climate displacement through the underdeveloped concept of cultural survival. It asks whether contemporary international law adequately protects communities whose physical relocation may preserve individual life while simultaneously threatening collective cultural continuity. The study combines doctrinal analysis of international human rights law, refugee and migration law, indigenous rights, and climate governance with a normative examination of cultural rights. Particular attention is given to small island communities, indigenous peoples, and territorially rooted populations whose cultural practices depend upon specific ecological and geographical environments. The article argues that existing protection frameworks remain excessively individualized and therefore fail to capture the collective dimensions of climate-related cultural loss. It proposes a cultural continuity framework for planned relocation and cross-border climate mobility based on community participation, collective relocation where desired, preservation of political and social institutions, linguistic rights, access to culturally significant territory where feasible, heritage documentation, and legal mechanisms protecting communal identity following resettlement. Such protections should supplement rather than replace individual human rights and should not be used to restrict individuals who prefer integration or independent migration. By integrating environmental displacement with cultural rights, the article reframes climate mobility as more than a humanitarian or territorial problem. It concludes that a legitimate global response to climate displacement must protect not only the physical survival of affected populations but also their capacity to maintain and transform their cultures through processes determined substantially by the communities themselves.