Vladimir Carrasco arrived in Belém, Brazil, three weeks ago with a clear mission: to amplify the voices of people displaced by extreme weather disasters. He was attending the annual international climate treaty negotiations known as COP30 for the first time. As climate justice director for L.A.’s Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, Carrasco has seen how worsening climate change forces families abroad to flee to the U.S. He returned to L.A. disappointed.
“There was minimal conversation about immigrants,” he said.
Immigrants, refugees, and climate-displaced people remain one of the groups most vulnerable to climate change, which is largely caused by the fossil fuel industry’s pollution. Over the past decade, weather disasters have forced about 250 million people to search for new homes within their countries, a recent U.N. report estimates. That’s 70,000 people a day. And these numbers don’t capture those who cross international borders.
There are the Central American farmers who have been pushed into cities after prolonged droughts kill their crops yet again. And the families from the archipelago of Tuvalu in the Pacific who are already relocating to neighboring Australia. Scientists predict the chain of islands and atolls will be mostly underwater by 2100 as glaciers melt.
Despite climate change’s increased influence on migration patterns, the U.N. climate talks have largely ignored the issue. Indeed, negotiators have been reluctant to discuss migrants at all, perhaps due to rising xenophobia, suggests Jocelyn Perry, a senior advocate and program manager of the nonprofit Refugees International’s Climate Displacement Program. Instead, world leaders have prioritized discussions on reducing emissions, adapting to a changing planet, and the pathways to pay for it all.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States has become a world leader in attacking immigrants as Trump pours billions into expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, but the U.S. is not alone. Look at the U.K.’s policy shift on asylum to hasten deportations and make refugee status temporary, or South Africa, which constructed a wall on its Mozambique border last year – mimicking Trump’s actions in the American Southwest.
“The anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment has existed always,” Perry said, noting how the ideology has been growing globally. “It’s hard to find champions of support for migrants and refugee inclusion in climate policy.”
But advocates like Carrasco and Perry attended COP30 to ensure governments don’t forget about this essential group. And advocates did walk away with a few wins this year. A few key texts included explicit mentions of migrants and displacement – no small feat in these tense negotiating spaces where consensus is required.
“Negotiators at COP30 prevented wholesale backsliding with respect to migrants’ rights and climate change,” Perry said. “But little progress was made to further this recognition to other vulnerable groups, such as internally displaced people and refugees, who often face additional challenges to their ability to adapt and respond to climate change.”
A brief moment of hope
The U.N. space formally invites participation from several key groups, such as Indigenous peoples, youth, farmers, and women, but that list doesn’t include refugees, climate migrants, or climate-displaced people.
Climate mobility, the term advocates are more frequently using to cover the varied ways global heating affects human movement, had a moment in 2015. In one draft text developed months before COP21 in Paris that year, negotiators debated the establishment of a climate change displacement coordination facility that would provide emergency relief support, assist in planned relocation, and coordinate compensation for those who need to relocate.
“I was really excited,” said Andrea C. Simonelli, a coordinator with the member association Environment and Climate Mobilities Network who shared those draft documents with Yale Climate Connections. “The facility seemed like a reasonable solution.”
Thirteen days later, negotiators removed that line option from the text, so the idea never even made it to Paris, where the conference was held that year.
There, leaders did sign a landmark treaty that codified a global commitment to cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris Agreement acknowledged migrants in its text. And the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, which governs the climate negotiations, set up the Task Force on Displacement in 2015.
The task force provides recommendations to the committee leading the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. The WIM, as it’s called, provides technical expertise that informs the U.N.’s climate reparations fund, which was established in 2022 to distribute dollars from the wealthier nations that caused climate change by burning fossil fuels to lower-income countries that are bearing the cost.
Ten years later, advocates remain ambitious in their objectives.
“A facility, or something like it, would not only address the needs of migrants and displaced people, but also help stem the migration flows used to justify restrictionist border policies globally,” Simonelli said. “We can assist those falling through the policy cracks by keeping them safe, all while meeting national and regional economic needs. This assistance could provide a clear path to recovery for those most impacted.”
‘They must be included in solutions’
Perry sits on the Task Force on Displacement. On the ground in Belém, Perry and her partners succeeded in getting a few key COP documents to explicitly mention displaced communities and migrants. She is still pushing for community groups, not just governments, to have access to the climate reparation fund’s resources, too. If local organizations can also receive money, those dollars may more easily reach the people who need them.
“These inclusions … recognize that people living in displacement often do face significant losses and damages from the impacts of climate change and that they must be included in solutions,” Perry said.
Then there’s adaptation, the steps countries can take to keep their constituents safe in the face of climate disaster. To keep migrants and climate-displaced people safe, nations need to understand the forces that affect their ability to adapt. That means studying this specific group. Perry said she was happy to see COP30 negotiators include migrants in a key text, the Global Goal on Adaptation, that would encourage countries to do just that.
“If we’re measuring various adaptation indicators, knowing whether or not someone living in displacement is adapting with the same success rate as someone who’s not displaced in the same region would be really helpful to then understand how to shape policy to make things more equitable,” Perry said.
Protecting the right to stay home
This inclusion is why advocates like Carrasco fought to represent these voices. He attended as part of a delegation with the National Partnership for New Americans, an alliance of U.S. immigrant rights groups. The coalition had initially planned to bring climate-displaced people directly to COP30, but many of their leaders are either undocumented or in the process of securing legal status.
As long as climate mobility remains a peripheral issue at COP negotiations, these groups will grow more vulnerable. What if world leaders saw migration as a solution instead?
“When we have a society that is more welcoming and inclusive, then we have a more resilient community,” said Gabriela Roque, the climate and migration program manager at the National Partnership for New Americans.
The group is training refugees, climate migrants, and climate-displaced people to become leaders who can tell their own stories to people in power by teaching them about the science behind climate change and the environmental changes in their communities back home. Organizers want this group to better understand how planetary warming ultimately forced them to come to the U.S.
“We’re trying to rethink the way people think about migration,” Roque said.
For instance, climate mobility isn’t just about people on the move – it’s also about protecting a person’s right to stay.
“People do not want to leave the places they call home,” said Kamal Amakrane, managing director for the Global Centre for Climate Mobility and climate envoy for the president of the U.N. General Assembly’s 78th Session.
Adaptation requires local solutions, many of which cost a lot less than the $1.3 trillion countries are fighting over.
“No one talks about the community that needs $50,000 because they lost boats to the last flooding,” he said. “No one talks about the housing that is being destroyed because of landslides, and they need to rebuild.”
These impacts still elude many local governments. They need to analyze their communities if they want to be prepared for the various ways extreme weather will affect them. Laura Serena Mosquera, a Colombian lawyer working as the Global Centre for Climate Mobility’s climate mobility fellow, is developing a research project that would help a Colombian city understand its unique displacement patterns, the consequences of inaction, and the importance of keeping people safe no matter where they settle down.
“This is not an issue that you can just respond to,” she said. “You have to prevent.”
Whether world governments are talking about prevention or disaster recovery, they require money to get it done. They also need the polluting industries to leave fossil fuels in the ground to prevent a climate scenario that won’t doom them to failure.
“Despite great suffering, community members choose to show up for each other and recover together,” said Carrasco. “From California farmworkers to Indigenous leaders in Brazil, the people are calling for urgent climate intervention and real solutions. While COP30 delegates slow-crawl mediocre agreements, climate justice is not optional for communities living through disaster.”
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