1 Climate refugees: realizing justice through existing institutions Justin Donhauser Abstract This chapter examines avenues for realizing effective responses to mounting ‘climate refugee’ justice issues through UN refugee and climate policy mechanisms and institutions. It begins with a discussion of key normative justice issues that are unique to climate refugee cases, and explanation of the legal reasons climate refugees are not currently extended rights to non- refoulement, asylum, and relief, available to other sorts of refugees under the UN Refugee Convention. Subsequently, I assess five complementary proposals for addressing climate refugee issues and consider how the five proposals could be co-implemented to realize effective international responses to emerging climate refugee issues. Keywords Climate Refugees; Climate Adaptation; Refugee Justice; United Nations Refugee Convention; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Introduction Numerous chapters in this collection attend to the ethical and more theoretical considerations of addressing climate justice concerns. This chapter complements those works by critically examining concrete proposals for addressing climate refugee issues in particular. ‘Climate refugee’ describes migrants forced to flee their homelands and seek asylum due to experiencing losses and damages cause by events linked to global climate change. Such losses include, for example, damages from extreme storms, severe droughts and floods, sea-level rise, and numerous pollutant contamination issues. One paradigm case of climate refugeedom is Peruvian immigrants seeking asylum in the United Sates after their potable water and agricultural resources became poisonous due to heavy metals being released through rapid glacial melting and contaminating these necessities (cf. Gosling et al, 2011; Donhauser, 2018). Many sources document peoples who’ve been forced to migrate and not return to their homelands due to events linked to climate change, and leading advisory organizations point out that data suggests that the number of climate refugee cases will inevitably grow in coming years