The Case for a Climate-Conscious Convention on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters

In December 2024, the United Nations General Assembly took an extraordinary step: it adopted, by consensus, a resolution deciding to elaborate and conclude a legally binding instrument on the protection of persons in the event of disasters by 2027, based on the International Law Commission’s 2016 draft articles. This decision marks a rare instance in recent decades in which the General Assembly committed to negotiating a new treaty on the basis of the Commission’s draft articles. It also marks the culmination of nearly a decade of sustained work by the ILC, followed by years of diplomatic persistence in the UN. (See here for a comprehensive overview of the draft articles, and the history and next steps here.)

Such a feat is rare in the modern era. As the ILC reaches its 76th anniversary this year, some lament the bygone golden days of codification, when the Commission produced seminal works such as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Few recent ILC projects have been carried through to fruition in treaty form, with the most recent being the 2004 Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Property—and even then, this convention has not yet entered into force.

Against this backdrop, the fact that the draft articles have now reached this stage is monumental. Furthermore, the fact that this moment arrives just as the ILC concludes its work on sea-level rise this year adds a certain synchronicity. One can suggest a thematic continuity across the two projects that addresses the risks posed by climate change. Not only that, but it also underscores an urgency: there is no guarantee that a similar opportunity, with draft articles formally supported by the UN General Assembly, will arise again.

This blog post argues that, to maintain contemporary relevance of the draft articles and international law-making more broadly, upcoming treaty negotiations should not approach the draft articles in a vacuum. Instead, they should be consciously framed through a climate-sensitive lens, recognising the role of climate change in shaping the nature and impact of disasters today.

The Climate-Disaster Nexus: a precedented link

One risk facing the future disasters convention is the temptation to treat it as an isolated instrument that engages with disasters only in the context of prevention, response, and relief. This approach would not only be narrow, but also conceptually outdated. Climate change has long been recognised as a key driver of the increasing frequency and severity of disasters. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C underscores that disaster risks are projected to be significantly higher at 1.5°C of warming and will increase further at 2°C. The scientific consensus thus acknowledges the inherent link between climate and disasters, providing an important normative foundation for the future disasters convention to address climate-related risks. Nor is such understanding confined to scientific circles: during the course of the UN General Assembly Sixth (Legal) Committee’s deliberations, many States specifically pointed to the interrelationship between climate change and disasters as a key rationale for advancing a treaty on disasters.

Bridging International Law on Disasters and Climate Change

The ILC’s draft articles themselves support this understanding. At first glance, they may appear rooted in traditional humanitarian and disaster response concerns, but closer reading reveals an opportunity to anchor this treaty within the climate change discourse. While it is impossible for this post to comprehensively examine the full range of legal issues that arise at the intersection of the ILC draft articles on disasters and climate change, several aspects warrant highlighting.

The first concerns the definition of “disaster” under Article 3(a) of the draft articles. The term is kept deliberately broad, referring to “a calamitous event or series of events resulting in widespread loss of life, great human suffering and distress, mass displacement, or large-scale material or environmental damage, thereby seriously disrupting the functioning of society.” Crucially, this provision does not distinguish between anthropogenic and natural origins. As the commentaries to the draft articles make clear, no such limitation was included because “disasters often arise from complex sets of causes that may include both wholly natural elements and contributions from human activities.”

This capacious framing is particularly apt in the climate context, where causation is seldom singular and often cumulative. It also aligns well with the prevailing scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. Not only does “human influence [unequivocally warms] the atmosphere, ocean and land”, but that warming directly heightens disaster risk (see the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report). Put simply, the majority of contemporary disasters are not purely natural phenomena. This definitional flexibility is therefore a functional strength that should be retained during treaty negotiations.

This flexibility is also directly applicable to sea-level rise specifically, which is already recognised as a form of slow-onset disaster both in the draft articles’ commentaries and State interventions in the Sixth Committee (e.g., the Philippines, Thailand, and Tanzania). This understanding is reinforced by the ILC’s Final consolidated report of the Co-Chairs of the Study Group on sea-level rise in relation to international law, which links the two bodies of work by acknowledging that “international legal frameworks [in the context of disasters and climate change] could be further developed in a more specific, coherent and complete manner in order to effectively protect persons [from] sea-level rise.”

The second aspect is the duty of cooperation under Article 7, which draws from the well-established principle of international cooperation. This principle is foundational in fields where transboundary impacts require joint responses—nowhere more so than in the context of climate change. The obligation is, for example, embedded throughout the Paris Agreement, e.g., collective mitigation (Arts. 4 and 6), adaptation (Art. 7), finance (Art. 9), technology (Art. 10), capacity-building (Art. 11), and transparency (Art. 13). In the context of sea-level rise specifically, States in the Sixth Committee have emphasised that international cooperation is indispensable (e.g., Argentina, India, and the Netherlands). This accords with Article 7’s obligation to cooperate in all stages of the disaster cycle as covered by the draft articles.

Finally, Article 9 calls on each State to “reduce the risk of disasters” through appropriate legislative and regulatory measures. This provides grounds for interpreting and operationalising obligations through climate-related frameworks, as such tools are also core to climate policy: the disaster risk reduction measures identified in Article 9 (risk assessments, early warning systems, collection and dissemination of information) are precisely the types of tools deployed in climate mitigation planning, such as Environmental Impact Assessments.

Taken together, the draft articles are already climate-relevant in substance and provide a solid bedrock to build a treaty that addresses climate-related disasters, including sea-level rise. What is needed now is for the upcoming negotiations to intentionally bridge the gap between disaster risk reduction and response, and climate action. It is uniquely positioned to do so as the to-be universal flagship treaty filling the lacuna in the fragmented corpus of international disaster law—one currently governed by soft law such as the Sendai Framework, and regional or bilateral instruments.

 Towards Complementary Legal Regimes

So why does this discussion matter—what are the practical outcomes of integrating climate discourse into the disasters treaty negotiations? First, placing climate at the forefront of the talks reflects today’s reality that anthropogenic warming magnifies disasters, an acknowledgement that will modernise international disaster law. Second, it promotes systemic integration of international law among the ILC’s draft articles on disasters, its work on sea-level rise, and the wider climate-governance treaty system, thereby reducing fragmentation, avoiding conflicting obligations, and enhancing legal clarity for effective implementation. Indeed, the treaty negotiation process can serve as a complementary avenue to strengthen climate change obligations—one that can respond to the human impacts of climate-related disasters even if framed under a different legal rubric. Finally, the ultimate dividend is paid to people and populations vulnerable to disasters and climate change.

The significance of the current institutional momentum towards disasters treaty negotiations is not to be missed. Opportunities to codify international law such as these are, by their nature, infrequent and contingent upon political will. As States prepare to submit proposals for the treaty’s text and enter negotiations by 2026, it is easy to imagine this process stalling, or being limited to a narrow disaster assistance regime focused on logistics, sovereignty, and relief. Yet viewing the draft convention merely as such would be unfaithful to both the substance of the draft articles and the context of our time—and would be a profound missed opportunity. If approached with a vision and understanding of the draft’s broader normative potential, the disasters convention can consolidate the ILC’s legacy and build a legal framework reflecting the realities shaping how disasters unfold, whom they affect, and what the international community owes to those left most exposed.