The Fund for responding to Loss and Damage presents an opportunity to increase the climate finance streams that support work on human mobility. Concerted efforts are needed to ensure that climate migrants are involved in decision-making.

In 2023, disasters led to some 26.4 million internal displacements, with 7.7 million people still displaced at the end of the year.[1] By 2050, there could be 216 million internal climate migrants if no climate or development action is taken (there are no current estimates for the likely number of cross-border climate migrants).[2]

The direct and indirect costs and impacts of these movements for affected persons, communities and countries are significant, if largely underestimated or completely unreported. Even without accounting for these costs, the current financial landscape is not aligned with the scale and needs of the most climate-vulnerable countries and their populations. Climate funds are particularly limited in their offer for supporting action related to human mobility. A 2018 mapping by the Task Force on Displacement (TFD) shows that only a small proportion of the programmes funded by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) at the time addressed human mobility. In recent years, the situation has remained unchanged, as most work on climate change and human mobility is still funded outside the climate finance sector, and primarily relies on other donors focused on humanitarian response.

Accelerating human mobility operations

The creation of the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage presents an opportunity to increase the climate finance streams that support work on human mobility. The Fund was established following 30 years of advocacy by the countries most vulnerable to climate change. It aims to respond to the most devastating impacts of climate change, including when they are irreversible. The need to set up the Fund was agreed at COP27. At COP28 in December 2023 States decided to operationalise the Fund and pledged contributions which currently stand at around USD 700 million.

The set-up of the Fund seems conducive to a stronger integration of human mobility objectives and responses into climate action. Its scope explicitly includes displacement, planned relocation and migration. It is the first time that a climate fund has highlighted human mobility as part of its designated thematic areas.

Moreover, climate migrants are meant to be consulted in the work of the Fund and its board. While operationalising this presents potential challenges, people on the move are now acknowledged as beneficiaries of climate funding.

States also indicated that activities supported by existing multilateral climate finance institutions and funds should include refugees and climate migrants. This broadens the space for people displaced by climate change to participate in decision-making, acknowledges their role as actors of change and multiplies the opportunities for long-term climate finance investments into responses to human mobility.

Lastly, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) will be part of a high-level dialogue to coordinate the work of the Fund and other loss and damage funding arrangements. This is a further indication that human mobility operations are relevant in these discussions and important to decision-making on funding allocation.

In addition, two features of the Fund could encourage effective work on human mobility. Firstly, it establishes a minimum allocation for least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDSs), recognising the disproportionate effects of climate change on the most vulnerable countries and their populations.[3] Secondly, communities should be able to access the Fund through small grants, which opens the possibility for migrants, displaced persons and refugees to directly access these resources.

What is needed now?

The Fund’s Board (its governing body) and the interim secretariat (which provides expertise and support to the Board) have met three times in advance of COP29, and will meet once more in 2024 to create the structures and define the modalities of the Fund, including access and disbursement, as well as stakeholder participation in the work of the Board. Careful consideration should be given to the integration of human mobility in the progress of this work.

For the references to human mobility in the COP28 decisions to be fully operationalised, baseline knowledge of what could be funded, and what is already funded, is needed. During the 2023 negotiations, thematic needs and priorities were only touched upon. This was due to the difficulty in prioritising specific topics among the vast scope of impacts and responses that are all deemed important to the discussions on loss and damage in different countries. As the structure and modalities of the Fund are being articulated, the time is ripe to advance a more detailed thematic discussion.

The inclusion of human mobility issues in the scope of the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage needs to translate into action addressing the following three goals:

1. Add displacement and its impacts to the loss and damage bill
   The resources needed to address the growing occurrence, duration, costs and impacts of displacement in the context of climate change should be factored into the determination of the scale of finance needed and made available through the Fund and other funding arrangements. All relevant efforts will have to be amplified to address the full extent of humanitarian, transition and durable solution needs in the coming decades.
2. Allocate climate finance for comprehensive planned relocations
   Resources should be made available to support affected countries to relocate communities from at-risk areas, as a last resort, when in-situ adaptation is no longer viable. Planned relocation processes must be consultative and based on human rights, and should support interventions that address all dimensions of people’s and communities’ well-being, which makes them lengthy and costly. In the absence of appropriately resourced processes, these operations often result in further loss and damage, as livelihoods are disrupted, cultural practices lost and economic prosperity and human security undermined.
3. Invest to leverage the positive potential of migration
   Long-term approaches to loss and damage should be established and supported to enable vulnerable countries to make early, proactive investments for safe migration. This means setting up policies, strategies, plans and investments to absorb the arrival of new migrants, grant migrants protection of rights and access to services or provide people at risk with opportunities for dignified migration. This could include labour schemes, family reunification or humanitarian visas via bilateral or multi-lateral agreements.

Realising the Fund’s potential

There are multiple opportunities to operationalise these goals for human mobility in the Fund. Most prominently, the Task Force on Displacement under the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage is preparing three relevant technical guides.

The Technical guide on accessing finance for averting, minimizing, and addressing the impacts of displacement associated with climate change impacts will present an overview of the funding options for displacement response within climate finance mechanisms, as well as the capacities, technical requirements and process to access such funding.

The Technical guide on averting, minimizing and addressing non-economic losses in the context of human mobility is aimed at supporting national practitioners and policymakers to identify the non-economic losses linked to human mobility and respond to them. Different types of non-economic losses in the context of human mobility will require different actors and expertise. A combination of sectoral approaches ranging from improving healthcare access, ecosystem management, and initiatives to promote both cultural preservation and social cohesion will be needed.

The Technical guide on integrating human mobility and climate change linkages into relevant national climate change planning processes could be used to support countries to develop, update and implement human mobility approaches within their national plans. As the modalities of the Fund are still being established, it is not yet clear whether and how recipients will need to demonstrate incurred loss and damage and assistance needs. Potential avenues are the national planning processes, such as the national adaptation plans and the nationally determined contributions, and loss and damage assessments at national and local levels. Many organisations are contributing to developing an assessments database, DesInventar 2.0, to track losses and damages and their impacts. It is important that these efforts are recognised in the ongoing development of standard approaches and tools for the comprehensive assessments of climate action and climate change impacts.

Next steps

Specific discussions and processes related to participation will be needed in order to enable the engagement of migrants and refugees in decision-making on climate finance, action and support. There are practical challenges to deal with. The UN’s climate change agency, UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) has nine constituencies that represent a variety of interests and perspectives (including business and industry, environmental NGOs, indigenous people, farmers and others). There is no recognised constituency for migrants and displaced persons and there is also no defined representation for them within national planning fora. Further challenges include the limited opportunities for meaningful participation and engagement of community representatives in climate policy decision-making, and the insufficient availability of resources to support relevant processes.

Organisations working on human mobility and climate change have produced recommendations on practical ways forward. This could entail working with existing networks of grassroots organisations representing migrants, building the capacities of their representatives to contribute to climate policy discussions, and integrating their representatives in existing constituencies that have a seat in climate negotiations.

Multiple key actors will need to increase their efforts to accelerate climate finance allocation towards human mobility. The existing climate funds, such as the Green Climate Fund, Adaptation Fund and the Global Environmental Facility, should leverage the COP28 decision towards funding more proposals with contributions from, and for the benefit of, people on the move. At the same time, more proposals related to displacement, planned relocation and migration need to be submitted to these funds, which requires governmental institutions and other organisations working on human mobility to strengthen their capacity to secure climate funds.

Finally, IOM should leverage its seat on the High Level Dialogue on Loss and Damage to amplify messages and priorities from the broader human mobility community. In particular, there is a need for organisations working on migration to showcase the investments they have already made to respond to climate mobility, and the need for additional resources to come in from climate finance.

While the COP28 decision provides a foundation to respond to human mobility in the context of climate change, bridging the gap in the allocation of climate finance will require continued efforts to make relevant impacts and needs more visible, as well as making relevant work more prominent, for governments, communities and other stakeholders. At this juncture of global climate negotiations, human mobility actors can play an essential role in shaping a funding landscape that supports more effective work to avert, minimise and address impacts for the most vulnerable people in climate-affected countries.

 

Ileana Sînziana Pușcaș
Climate Migration Senior Expert, International Organization for Migration
ispuscas@iom.int
linkedin.com/in/ileana-sinziana-puscas-2604ab4a/

Lorenzo Guadagno
Project Coordinator, Platform on Disaster Displacement
lorenzog@unops.org
linkedin.com/in/lorenzo-guadagno-63ab4915/

The authors would like to thank colleagues from the Loss and Damage Collaboration and its Working Group on the Challenges of Displacement and Human Mobility and of the Advisory Group on Human Mobility and Climate Change for the enriching discussions they organised on this topic for the last two years, from which the authors drew some of the inspiration for this article.

 

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Organization for Migration nor of the Platform on Disaster Displacement.

[1] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2024) Global Report on Internal Displacement bit.ly/idmc-grid-2024

[2] World Bank Group (2021) ‘Climate change could force 216 people to Migrate…’ bit.ly/climate-change-migrate

[3]See IOM (2019) Climate Change and Migration in Vulnerable Countries bit.ly/climate-change-vulnerable-countries

 

READ THE FULL ISSUE