IIT Madras urges countries to absorb people fleeing due to climate change

With climate change intensifying the push to migrate, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras on Thursday urged countries to absorb all asylum seekers.
The researchers asked countries to absorb the people fleeing due to the impact of climate change under the principle of “non refoulement”.
“This will ensure that refugees are not forced to return to their home countries to face harm,” the institute shared in a statement.
Non-refoulement is a fundamental principle of international law that forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they would be in likely danger of persecution based on “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.
Further, proposing a normative framework with responses to address cross-border migration, published in the peer-reviewed journal Wires Climate Change, the researchers noted that the asylum seekers from vulnerable zones must be absorbed in host countries in proportion to their greenhouse gas emissions.