Climate change has become one of the most severe and far-reaching challenges of our time, with existential consequences for ecosystems, biodiversity, and human populations – as pointed out by the International Court of Justice’s recent advisory opinion. Its impacts extend well beyond the environmental sphere, positioning it as a defining governance challenge with direct implications for human rights, economic resilience, geopolitical stability, and migration systems. Across all regions, rising temperatures, droughts, floods, storms, and land degradation are already reshaping living conditions, undermining livelihoods, and transforming patterns of human mobility.
The scale of these dynamics is already considerable and set to grow. Over the past decade, weather-related disasters have triggered approximatively 250 million internal displacements – equivalent to around 70,000 displacements per day, two displacements every three seconds, while projections indicate that up to 216 million people could be displaced within their countries by 2050. At the same time, scientific evidence points to a deeper structural transformation of global human habitability. Climate change has already placed approximately 9% of the global population - over 600 million people - outside of historically favourable environmental conditions, often referred to as human climate niche. Under current policy trajectories, leading to around 2.7°C of global warming, this proportion could rise to between 22% and 39% by the end of the century (2080–2100)¹.
These trends signal more than an intensification of climate related displacement; they point to a profound reconfiguration of where people will be able to live safely and sustainably. However, if climate pressures are set to persist - the scale, timing, and nature of future mobility remain far from predetermined, and will be shaped by policy and programmatic choices made today.
As with mitigation efforts under the Paris Agreement, decisions taken today on local adaptation and safe mobility options will determine not only the scale of future movements, but - more critically – their timing, nature, and protection implications. Human mobility can unfold as a planned and dignified adaptation strategy or as crisis-driven displacement with severe humanitarian consequences. Reactive forced displacement is not inevitable. With forward-looking policies - identifying where adaptation can sustain viable conditions and anticipating when mobility pathways should be enabled – forced displacement can be reduced, and in some cases prevented, while supporting development outcomes and advancing climate justice.
Delivering on this will require a nuanced understanding of how climate change act as a risk multiplier, of the continuum of mobility and immobility outcomes it generates, and of how on-site adaptation and safe mobility pathways can be complementary – rather than competing or merely sequential - strategies.
Understanding climate change as a risk multiplier
No country is immune to climate change; however, its consequences are profoundly unequal among individuals and communities. Climate impacts intersect with pre-existing vulnerabilities linked to poverty, gender inequality, disability, age, geographic isolation, and unequal access to services and adaptation finance. In fragile and conflict-affected settings, climate stress acts as a threat multiplier: it intensifies competition over scarce resources, exacerbates social tensions, and interacts with governance fragilities.
Simultaneously, most climate-related mobility occurs within countries or regions already under environmental and socio-economic pressure, while three in every four people fleeing war, violence or persecution now live in countries highly vulnerable to climate-related hazards, creating concentrated zones of vulnerability where absorption capacity is limited and settlement often unsustainable.
These vulnerabilities - whether systemic, individual, or at the intersection of both - remain decisive in determining whether communities can adapt, or are instead pushed toward harmful coping strategies that heighten the risks of protracted forced displacement, exploitation, and abuse, including trafficking. Responses to these vulnerabilities must therefore be more systematically considered and integrated into adaptation programming as well as to ensure timely and inclusive access to international adaptation funding mechanisms and safe mobility pathways.
Understanding how climate mobility unfolds
Climate change generates a continuum of mobility outcomes, ranging from internal and cross-border migration to forced displacement, planned relocation in areas becoming uninhabitable, and situations of involuntary immobility affecting those unable - or unwilling - to move despite escalating risks.
Importantly, climate-related mobility rarely occurs as a sudden event, except in the case of acute disasters. Mobility linked to slow-onset climate impacts typically unfolds progressively as part of broader adaptation processes. Households often rely first on local coping strategies - such as adjusting agricultural practices, diversifying livelihoods, or engaging in temporary mobility - before movement becomes unavoidable. In other situations, one family member may migrate to support those who remain and continue attempting to adapt in place.
These patterns highlight a critical policy insight: climate-related trajectories are not predetermined. They emerge from the interaction between climatic stressors, pre-existing vulnerabilities, and the availability and effectiveness of both adaptation measures and safe mobility options.
Exposure to climate hazards alone does not determine mobility outcomes; vulnerability and adaptive capacity do. Recognising this interplay is essential to ensure that interventions align with the progressive erosion of livelihoods, rising risks, and communities’ own efforts to adapt.
Combining local resilience and safe mobility in climate adaptation strategies
Investments in climate-resilient agriculture, infrastructure, water management, education, and livelihood diversification remain essential to sustaining communities and reducing distress-driven migration. Expanding equitable access to adaptation finance is equally critical, particularly as those most exposed to climate impacts are often the least equipped to access international funding mechanisms. Mobilising a broader range of actors and resources - including private investment, diaspora engagement, and remittance flows - can further strengthen local resilience and enhance the impact of development aid interventions.
However, in situ adaptation alone will not always be sufficient in a context of narrowing habitability thresholds. It is therefore essential to identify when adaptation investments cease to deliver sustainable outcomes, and when anticipatory action should instead focus on ensuring access to safe, regular, and dignified mobility pathways.
This requires recognising mobility itself as part of effective climate change adaptation strategies. When supported through safe, regular, and predictable pathways - combined with adequate reception and integration support - mobility can strengthen resilience and contribute to development outcomes in both countries of origin and destination, including by supporting labour markets facing demographic decline in the global north.
Serving climate justice through anticipatory governance
Ultimately, today’s choices will determine whether climate-related mobility unfolds as managed adaptation or through escalating humanitarian crises.
Shifting from reaction to anticipation is not only a governance imperative; it is a matter of climate justice. Those most exposed to climate impacts have often contributed the least to global greenhouse emissions and face the greatest constraints in adapting. At the same time, most climate-related mobility takes place within countries or neighbouring regions already under pressure from similar environmental stressors and limited resources, further concentrating vulnerability in fragile contexts.
Ensuring that mobility remains, as far as possible, a matter of choice — and that when it occurs, it is safe and dignified — is therefore a collective responsibility the international community can no longer afford to overlook.
¹ Quantifying the human cost of global warming | Nature Sustainability
About the author
Solène Jolly is Project Officer for the Rabat Process. Solène has over a decade of legal and policy experience in international human rights and refugee law, migration and border governance, and disarmament. Previously, she served as Human Rights Officer for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), advising on European and North African human-rights-based approaches to migration and border governance. She also led capacity-building events for States Parties and advised on treaty implementation. at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW); and served as a Negotiator Adviser at the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, focusing on the reform of the Common European Asylum System, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, and EU approaches to rescue and disembarkation at sea.
This piece is a product of the Special Event on Climate-Induced Mobility technical meetings of the Rabat Process in Abuja, Nigeria; co-hosted by Nigeria and Switzerland in January 2026. More information on ICMPD’s work in this field, in the Outcome Document here.