3 August 2026

Since 2012, I have had the privilege of working alongside communities, policymakers, researchers and local community leaders across several continents on the question of climate change and migration. In this article, I use ‘climate migration’ in a broad sense, while recognising that policy frameworks often distinguish between migration, displacement, planned relocation and immobility.

I remember interviewing people displaced by conflict in the Sahel in 2013. Again and again, the same pattern emerged. While conflict typically made the headlines, drought, failed harvests and land degradation were often the tipping points that finally forced people to leave. Since then, research has consistently shown⁠ that climate-related movement is multicausal: the consequence of multiple factors coming together to shape people’s decisions to leave their land and communities behind.

A decade later, the challenge is no longer only to make climate migration visible. It is to ensure that the policy architecture built since the Nansen Initiative – from the Warsaw International Mechanism and its Task Force on Displacement to the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage – translates into protection, finance and practical options for people and communities.

In 2015, the Nansen Initiative’s Agenda for the Protection of Cross-Border Displaced Persons in the context of Disasters and Climate Change⁠ helped shift policy discussions in two important ways.

First, while focused on cross-border disaster displacement, it situated that issue within a broader mobility landscape: people displaced across borders in the context of disasters and climate change; those at risk of future displacement; internally displaced persons affected by disasters; communities facing planned relocation; and people using migration as an adaptation strategy to climate change and environmental degradation.

Secondly, drawing on regional consultations and examples of effective practices⁠, it outlined practical measures that policymakers could take to protect people moving across borders because of climate and environmental impacts. This helped move the debate beyond the politically charged and legally fraught notion of ‘climate refugees’ and towards the variety of policy options available to address both the causes and consequences of climate migration.

That shift mattered because the Nansen Initiative Protection Agenda did not create a new treaty or argue that a single legal category could capture the complexity of climate migration. Instead, it built political consensus around a more grounded question: what were States, communities and international actors already doing⁠ to prevent displacement where possible, protect people when movement was unavoidable, and find solutions afterwards – and what more could be done?

It was one of the building blocks of the progress seen across global discussions. In my earlier work with Dina Ionesco on the governance of climate migration⁠, we argued that climate mobility was increasingly being taken up across the policy areas of climate change, migration governance, sustainable development and disaster risk reduction. Ten years ago, this kind of policy architecture across global, regional and national levels seemed politically unimaginable.

The decision accompanying the 2015 Paris Agreement gave further political weight to human mobility by requesting the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism to establish a Task Force on Displacement to develop recommendations for integrated approaches to ‘avert, minimize and address’ displacement related to the adverse impacts of climate change⁠.

That may sound technical, but in practice, it was a major step. Building on earlier recognition of migration, displacement and planned relocation in the climate change regime, the Task Force anchored displacement within the loss and damage agenda itself.

The Task Force’s work has been especially important because it helped translate broad political recognition into a more operational policy agenda. Its recommendations call for integrated approaches to avert, minimize and address displacement, including in relation to slow-onset impacts and better integration of human mobility into national planning processes.

This is particularly important for slow-onset impacts. As Alex Randall and I examined in 2022, some of the hardest governance questions relate to gradual processes – drought, desertification, sea-level rise, salinization, land degradation, ecosystem loss – that slowly erode safe and dignified living conditions. By the time movement becomes visible, the losses may already have been accumulating for years.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration⁠ reinforced this wider framing by recognising disasters, climate change and environmental degradation as drivers of migration, and by encouraging States to consider migration and planned relocation where appropriate. Legal scholars such as Jane McAdam and Tamara Wood⁠ have also analysed the relevance of the Global Compact to people displaced across borders in the context of climate change and disasters.

This policy architecture is an achievement. But carefully negotiated words are not protection, and recognition is not implementation. This is where loss and damage⁠ becomes central.

Loss and damage has moved from the margins to the centre of climate negotiations. The topic can sound technical and distant, but at its core, it asks a simple and urgent question: what do people actually lose because of climate change?

The answer, when you listen to the people experiencing it, is not simple at all. It includes livelihoods, homes, crops, infrastructure and land. But it also includes mental health, cultural continuity, graves, sacred sites, language, memory, traditions, social networks, and the severing of ties to place that took generations to build. When a community is displaced, it loses part of the world that made it possible to be who it was.

This is why framing climate mobility within loss and damage matters. Displacement can be a consequence of loss and damage. Planned relocation can be a response to loss and damage. Migration can be a form of adaptation, but also a sign that other adaptation options have failed or become insufficient. Immobility can reflect resilience and attachment to places of origin, but also poverty, exclusion, age, disability and gender constraints, or the absence of safe pathways to migrate with dignity. A serious approach to loss and damage has to hold all of these realities at once.

The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage⁠, agreed at COP27 and operationalized at COP28, represents a historic commitment. Its mandate includes support for developing countries particularly vulnerable to climate impacts in responding to economic and non-economic loss and damage associated with extreme weather events and slow-onset events. Importantly, the Fund does not treat mobility as a side issue: its scope includes displacement, migration and planned relocation, and refers to the need for people to move, when they must, in ways that are safe, dignified and fair.

This raises immediate governance questions. How can the Fund support people and communities affected by displacement, not only damaged infrastructure? How can it respond to non-economic losses linked to culture, identity, health, territory and belonging? How can it support preparedness before displacement occurs, as well as recovery and solutions afterwards? How can it work coherently with humanitarian, development, disaster risk reduction, migration and human rights systems without forcing communities to navigate an impossible institutional maze?

In the decade since the Protection Agenda, I have found myself having versions of the same conversation all over the world – whether with a taxi driver in Miami or a shop assistant in Azerbaijan. ‘We might have to move. We cannot stay where we are because of what is happening to the climate.’

This is why the Fund matters. If designed and implemented well, it could help move the response from piecemeal approaches and pilot initiatives towards larger-scale support that reflects how people actually experience climate impacts. It could help make access to finance real for local organizations and authorities, women’s groups, Indigenous peoples and youth leaders – provided they are not filtered out by procedures designed for large institutions.

The scope of the challenge can feel paralysing, but it shouldn’t be. Imperfect action taken now will always be better than perfectly conceptualized frameworks that never reach the people who need them. In many different communities, I have heard people describing measures that work: new agricultural practices responding to changing rainfall patterns; local early warning systems built with whatever tools were available; community data being organized; evacuation routes being mapped; losses being documented; livelihood options being created where formal systems had not yet arrived. These are not people waiting for international frameworks to save them: they are already adapting and protecting their communities. The real test for the Fund is whether it can get resources and technical support to these actors – not simply acknowledge them in decisions.

Returning to the title of this article: the unfinished business of the Nansen Initiative is implementation, while the real hope is that we are no longer starting from zero. We have concepts, institutions, evidence, advocates, communities with lived experience, and now a Fund that offers new opportunities. The next decade has to be about making these tools work effectively for people who are making decisions about whether they can stay, whether they must move, and how they can build lives of safety, dignity and belonging.

Mariam Traore Chazalnoël is an international policy expert specializing in climate mobility and migration governance. She has worked for more than fifteen years in senior roles within the United Nations system on migration and climate change.