They are a reality, and yet they do not exist -- at least not in the nomenclature of the international organisations set up to protect the rights and dignity of the world's most vulnerable denizens.

Because they flee environments made unlivable by shifting weather patterns or rising seas rather than political persecution or war, these refugees slip between the cracks into a bureaucratic grey zone.

However an unlikely band of dogged French photographers and journalists, in part, is bearing witness to the devastating impact of rising global temperatures on the daily lives of ordinary people.

After four years wandering the globe, from the dust bowl that used to be Lake Chad to the melting permafrost of Alaska to the sinking island paradise of Tuvalu, the Argos Collective have put the fruit of their investigations between covers.

Already published in French and soon to appear in English, "Climate Refugees" published by Infolio is the first book ever devoted exclusively to showing the consequences of climate change up close and personal.

Using the massive 2500-page report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the scientists who wrote it as their guides, the collective pinpointed nine locales in which global warming has played at least a major role in making life difficult, if not unbearable.

"Our job is to tell stories we have heard and bear witness to what we have seen," said Guy-Pierre Chomette, one of three writers and six photographers, all freelance.

"The science was already there when we started in 2004, but we wanted to emphasize the human dimension of the problem, especially for those most vulnerable," he said.

Starting with a single magazine assignment, they gradually attracted government and corporate backing for the project.

The narratives are rendered all the more gripping by the dignity of those profiled.

There is Mina, an Inupiak from the tiny hamlet of Shishmaref in Alaska, watching the waves drag her house into the sea at a time of year -- late October -- when the ocean should have already frozen over.

Temperatures near the Arctic have risen faster than anywhere in the world, and the result has been the rapid upending of an entire ecosystem.

Mina remembers playing checkers with her grandfather 30 years ago, when the house was a safe 100 meters (yards) from the sea. Soon the entire village -- perched on a shrinking island -- will disappear.

We also meet Uncle Mannnan and his wife, living in a dirt house on a dirt dike struggling to hold back the brackish water of the mangroves that spread like tentacles along the coast of Bangladesh.

The invasion of salt water has long ago killed off their rice fields and cows, and they now subsist by working shrimp farms and foraging in the pirate-invested mangroves.

The IPCC has said that Bangladesh will lose 10 percent of its surface area if sea levels rise 45 centimeters (18 inches), but recent studies show the rise is likely to be double that by century's end.

Nearly 300 million people -- 300 million Uncle Mannans -- live in these delicately-balanced flood plains throughout Asia.

There are "many factors that could cause populations to leave the regions where they live, and to become 'climate refugees'," said Jean Jouzel, France's foremost climate scientist, in an introduction to the book.

The IPCC report, he notes, says that hundreds of millions of people will be exposed to increased water shortages that could force them to flee, while millions more could be displaced by floods. Expanding deserts, and diminishing crops in Africa are also threats, he said.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York, cites the war in Sudan's Darfur as an example where climate change has already driven a badly-stressed region over the brink.

"Darfur is a place that has had about one third of its usual precipitation over the last 50 years, it's also had a big increase in population at the same time, so it is being squeezed badly between falling water availability and rising population," he told AFP.

"We're going to see a lot of that in the future, because there are a lot of poor, fragile, conflict-ridden or conflict-prone areas, especially in the drylands, that are likely to be in the line of fire, as it were, of climate change."

The Stern Review, a 2006 assessment on the economics of climate change authored by British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, quoted estimates of as many as 150-200 million "permanently displaced" environmental refugees by mid-century.

The Argos Collective -- composed entirely of freelance journalists -- has not yet decided whose stories to tell next, but they will, said Chomette, be related to the environment.

"There are too many stories to be told," he said.

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