Between 2008 and 2025, roughly 28.7 million people were displaced inside Pakistan by disasters — floods, mostly, along with drought and coastal erosion, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. The 2022 floods alone displaced 7.9 million people, a third of the country underwater at once. None of these people are refugees. Not because they haven’t lost everything, but because the word doesn’t legally apply to them, and neither does almost anything else.

The convention that doesn’t mention climate

The 1951 Refugee Convention — still the foundational document of international protection law — grants refugee status to people fleeing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. It says nothing about floods, droughts, or rising seas, because it wasn’t written with climate change in mind, and nothing since has formally amended it to include environmental displacement. A person fleeing a government is a refugee. A person fleeing a river that swallowed their village is, legally, nothing in particular.

There’s been one meaningful crack in that wall. In 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled on the case of Ioane Teitiota, a man from Kiribati who argued he couldn’t be safely returned home because of climate-driven conditions there. The Committee didn’t grant him refugee status — but it did say that returning someone to a place where climate change makes life genuinely unsafe could, in principle, violate their right to life. It’s a narrow opening, built for slow-onset disasters like sea-level rise in a Pacific island nation, not a legal framework anyone in Sindh or Balochistan can currently invoke.

Pakistan doesn’t have an answer either

The gap isn’t only international. Pakistan’s own National Climate Change Policy, first issued in 2012 and updated in 2022, barely mentions displacement — it’s listed as a vulnerability, not addressed as something requiring an actual response. There is no dedicated national law that gives disaster-displaced Pakistanis a guaranteed path to compensation, resettlement, or long-term support. What exists is emergency humanitarian response — relief camps and aid distribution which ends long before displacement does.

The land question makes this worse. Along the Indus, communities known as katcha cultivators — sharecroppers (a landowner permits a tenant to farm their land in exchange for a portion of the crops produced) and tenant farmers working the riverine belt often have no formal land title to begin with, occupying what one calls a “grey tenure zone” outside both official registries and recognized informal settlement. When floods destroy their land, the state has historically treated the loss as “voluntary abandonment” rather than expropriation — a distinction that conveniently avoids any compensation obligation under colonial-era property law that’s still on the books. People who had almost nothing to begin with lose it a second time.

What happens instead

Without a legal category and without compensation, displacement in Pakistan increasingly isn’t temporary — it’s just permanent, unofficially. Researchers who followed families displaced by the 2010 and 2022 floods to Karachi found most had no intention of returning, not out of choice but because there was nothing left to return to. One man, describing his decision to stay in Karachi for good, put it plainly: he’d die there, he said, because the flood had destroyed everything back home. Communities that resettled on Karachi’s outskirts after the 2010 floods were still living without basic utilities nearly a decade later, according to Oxfam research — displacement that never formally ended, just quietly became where people live now.

The law hasn’t caught up, and it’s not close

None of this is a gap anyone is actively closing. There’s no binding global treaty in progress, no Pakistani legislation drafted and waiting on a vote. The 2015 Peninsula Principles on Climate Displacement — a set of soft-law guidelines urging states to recognize the rights of people displaced within their own borders — exist and are, by researchers’ own account, not something Pakistani law has meaningfully absorbed.

So the 28.7 million aren’t waiting for a legal process to conclude. There isn’t one. They’re just living in it — inside a country that recognizes the disaster displaced them, and has no formal answer for what it owes them because of it.