On 24 January 2024, civil society and partners co-hosted a GFMD side event exploring how policy and development on regular pathways can respond to affected communities’ needs, as well as the role of art in providing alternative perspectives and solutions.
The 2022-24 Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD)* process culminated in the 14th GFMD Summit held in Geneva on 23-25 January 2024. Within the six thematic priorities** selected for this edition of the GFMD by the French Chairmanship, the impact of climate change on human mobility was chosen as the GFMD’s overarching and central topic, addressed via a cross-cutting approach through other thematic priorities, including that of labour migration.
On 24 January, the GFMD side event ‘Regular Pathways in the Age of Climate Change: Blending Policy, People, and Art’ sought to complement and extend GFMD discussions on labour migration in the context of climate change. Co-organised by the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), Secours Catholique-Caritas France, the GFMD Civil Society Mechanism, and the Climate, Migration and Displacement Platform (CMDP), and co-sponsored by the European Union and the governments of Fiji and Switzerland, the event explored how policy and development can respond to the communities most affected by slow-onset climate change, and the role of art in contextualising migration narratives and providing alternative perspectives and innovative solutions.
Climate change, human mobility, and labour migration at the GFMD
Labour migration, and specifically the availability and flexibility of regular pathways, was a central aspect of 2022-24 GFMD discussions on building climate resilience and enabling adaptation for both States and communities.
GFMD Background Papers prepared for the Government-led Roundtables on the impact of climate change on human mobility (GRT1) and labour migration (GRT4) both acknowledge the impacts of climate change on communities, mobility, and labour markets around the world, and point to the potential for labour migration to:
- Contribute to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in countries of origin, transit, and destination by enabling migrant workers to bring knowledge, skills, social networks, and cultural innovations.
- Support adaptation and just transitions in the context of climate change by presenting opportunities for those affected by climate change to diversify their income sources.
- Reduce the ‘green skills gap,’ in which demand for green talent is outstripping supply, by enabling migrant workers to be agents of just transitions towards green economies.
Anchored in the overarching objective of enhancing the availability and flexibility of regular pathways, the 24 January side event centred the agency and migration aspirations of communities most affected by climate change, taking a holistic view to underscore the central imperative of policymaking, partnerships, and stakeholder engagement that respond to lived realities, needs, and aspirations.
‘It’s a critical situation’: Charting the impacts of climate change in the absence of regular pathways
The side event started (and ended) with a short screening of Flatform’s ‘That Which To Come is Just a Promise’. The film features the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, with scenes of residents undertaking everyday activities such as playing games and chatting with friends, in dry conditions that gradually shift to the same scenes taking place amidst puddles and flooded areas. The film reminded participants that climate change and displacement are already a reality for many people, particularly in low-lying states.
Following opening remarks by Ambassador Christian Frutiger of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Shakirul Islam of Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP)
Shakirul Islam of Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP) described the widespread health, societal, and mobility impacts of increasing tidal surges seen in the past fifteen years in the coastal belt of Bangladesh. “High tides hit embankments every full moon, and the saline water that enters communities through these weakened structures floods crops, destroys houses, affects access to drinking water, removes livelihoods, and has severe impacts for health, in particular reproductive health for women and girls,” he explained. “Consequences include, for example, the significant amount of labour needed to find clean drinking water, and an increase in early marriage as families try to find husbands for their daughters before their skin and reproductive health are affected by using salinised water. This in turn leads to an increase in the issues associated with early marriage, such as early pregnancy and gender-based violence. When we think of sea level rises, we absolutely don’t take account of the full impacts.”
Helena Olea of Alianza Americas pointed to a lack of global awareness of the precarity of many communities affected by climate change in the Global South. “Situations that in the Global North are assumed to be permanent and normal, such as having insurance for agriculture, are absolutely not normal in Latin America,” she said. “When people lose their annual crop due to flood or drought, they lose all of their resources and their capacity to survive for a whole year. This has a devastating impact.”
In these contexts, the absence of rights-based, regular labour migration pathways for climate-affected people has severe consequences for both migrants and affected communities at large. “Seventy percent of households within the Bangladesh coastal area have at least one family member who has migrated,” stated Mr. Islam. “They don’t have resources to participate in mainstream labour migration, which in any case have very limited space, so they follow a labour migration pathway that is very unprotected. They mainly move to the Gulf, where they are generally tied to a single employer, which leaves them highly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.”
OKUP research indicates that many of those who have migrated from Bangladesh’s coastal communities have indeed experienced issues such as wage theft, and the absence on arrival of promised work and conditions. “Having taken out loans to facilitate their migration, when they return they often have no means to repay them, and so they find themselves in a situation of unmanageable and perpetual debt,” Mr. Islam explained. “This is a critical situation, and it’s really difficult to express the extent of the suffering experienced by those in this position.”
Shifting the narrative: Emphasising the right to stay
Within GFMD discussions on migration as an adaptation strategy in the context of climate change, a key priority for civil society was to emphasise the right for those affected to stay in their communities. “What we’re hearing from affected communities is ‘we want to stay, and to be able to have the right to stay’,” said 2022-24 GFMD civil society co-facilitator Marie Lobjoy of Secours Catholique-Caritas France, in her later reflections on the GFMD process. “Shifting the narrative to incorporate this perspective was really important, and within the preparatory meetings and at the Summit we emphasised that repeatedly.”
Ms. Olea reminded side event participants of the strong desire of affected communities to stay, and the long processes of severe and repeated impacts of climate change that eventually prompt decisions to move. “Many communities in Latin America do have possibilities to attempt to adapt to changing conditions, but in some cases recurring situations cause people to change their minds,” she said. “You can lose your home once, maybe twice, but are you going to bear that a third time before you decide to move?”
Mr. Islam pointed to the outcomes of OKUP research on mobility with affected communities in Bangladesh. “Seventy per cent of households don’t want to leave, because it’s our ancestral land, we have our own culture and communities, and we will lose this if we migrate” he said. “We must ensure that a rights-based approach to labour migration incorporates this strong desire of affected communities to stay, and enables people to make an informed and free choice about migrating. It has to be a choice.”
‘We cannot move forward without understanding the past’: A plea for history
Bernie Goulding of the Pacific Women’s Indigenous Network (WIN) and Mamadou Goïta, representing the Pan African Network in the Defense of Migrants’ Rights (PANiDMR), mapped the histories of their regions in relation to climate change.
“Natural disasters that are not of our making have put us in the Pacific on the frontline of climate change,” Ms. Goulding stated. “We have been colonised and recolonised by Europeans, fought in your wars, and been the site for your weapons testing in peacetime. Then you came back to get our resources, and many Pacific Island States have now been decimated by resource theft. The resulting climate change is happening right in front of us: that’s what we’ve been left with.”
Mr. Goïta similarly charted the long history of slavery, colonisation, and exploitation of resources, across the African continent and particularly in West Africa, and the ways in which this past is inextricably linked to present day climate change and its societal impacts.
“The first big contemporary droughts in the region, in the early 1970s, created the first generation of people who were forced to move south, pushing people producing staple crops off their land,” he remarked. “Humanitarian aid focused on maize and corn rather than our genetic heritage crops, and this enforced change in eating habits led to aid dependency, and a change in focus from agricultural production to large-scale, commercial crop production. People’s ability to sustain themselves in the face of climate change was therefore inhibited: this is a climate damage and a driver of inter-community conflict.”
Mr. Goïta additionally pointed to the further impacts of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) implemented in West Africa from the mid-1980s. “The SAPs again emphasised farming commercial crops, in order to make the money to pay back the loans the programmes provided. This, in turn, led to the disappearance of food staples such as cassava and yam, and overall to the loss of capacity of populations and countries to react,” he stated. “If we map conflict in West Africa today, we see that more than sixty per cent has its root in climate mobility and resultant conflicts over land and resources.”
Ms. Goulding emphasised the importance of historical perspectives in shaping contemporary narratives on migration, climate mobility, and climate justice. “If we remember this history, it changes the narrative in destination countries from ‘all these migrants that we don’t want’, to a discussion that’s about restorative justice and reparations,” she said. “So many of my people are not aware of this history, in particular children and youth. We need to gently tell those stories, to build our strength to challenge present narratives that are so damaging to us.”
‘It’s about wellbeing’: Loss, damage, and maintaining connections
Side event interventions and discussions focused strongly on losses incurred by communities and individuals affected by climate change, highlighting, in particular, the need to take account of non-economic losses in the context of international efforts such as the Loss and Damage fund agreed upon at COP28.
“For indigenous people it’s about wellbeing, meaning the connections to language, culture, and land from which we draw strength – it’s not just food and music,” explained Ms. Goulding. “In Australia and New Zealand, we are drawing on this strength by addressing these disconnects, in particular for Pacific youth in relation to culture, and bringing it to policy discussions such as those aimed, for example, at reducing the impacts of crime, and tackling the mental health issues and intergenerational trauma affecting our young people.”
Contributing from the floor, Dr. Aparajita Panda of CMDP emphasised the wide-ranging nature of the losses experienced when the impacts of climate change remove people’s ability to stay. “People are funnelled into pathways from a diverse range of contexts, into the single category of ‘migrant’,” he stated. “In this process we lose everything: culture, food, systems, knowledge, and relationships with commons. We have a right to the commons and to nature, and we can maintain these only at home.”
Ms. Olea highlighted the work of Indigenous communities from Mexico and Guatemala in the U.S to maintain connections, and emphasised in particular the significance of ensuring a right to return. “A key part of the work of these communities concerns how to maintain culture and language, and we can draw a lot of lessons from them in this regard,” she explained. “It’s very much about the right to return: for many of them, being able to periodically return is crucial to maintaining and strengthening those connections.”
Mr. Goïta made an additional plea for rights-based pathways to include perspectives on culture that support integration for migrant communities, in particular in destination countries in the Global North. “Culture is linked not just to land but to ways of dressing, to how we marry and how we celebrate,” he remarked. “When we migrate to Europe, all of our practices and even our languages are considered as problems, as signs of our unwillingness to integrate. A practice such as polygamy is linked to the culture of a people, for example, but when we migrate it makes us criminals. So a displaced person is criminalised because they maintain their culture, when we instead need a recognition that this is culture, and we cannot ask people to replace one culture with another.”
While welcoming consideration of non-economic losses, Mr. Islam urged a continued focus on economic loss. “People and communities experience asset loss and are forced to move due to climate change,” he stated. “In many cases, economic loss is what drives the mobility patterns that cause non-economic losses, and we must treat both as a combined issue.”
In his closing remarks, Dr. Dan Opon, Director for the National Coordination Mechanism on Migration (NCM), representing Kenya as the current Chair of the PDD, echoed the challenges of experiencing loss and damage by describing the regional dynamics and impacts of climate change on communities. As he noted, nomadic communities who rely entirely on their animals and crops for producing livelihoods are particularly affected by prolonged droughts and flooding in the Great Horn of Africa region. “When floods come after the drought, they should be celebrating that there is water and these animals will drink,” he said. “But the floods wreak havoc and sweep their animals downstream, so they live in a perpetual cycle of poverty induced by the ravaging effects of climate change.”
Expanding what’s possible: The role of art in imagining solutions for adaptation
Side event panellist Mary Mattingly, a visual artist, lecturer, and Guggenheim Fellow, presented her work on imagining and enacting alternative solutions in response to climate change, in particular on adaptation approaches to ensure access to food and water and preserve the right to stay.
“Art is about questioning and providing imagination,” she said. “‘When people can imagine their daily surroundings for climate adaptation, we all have more agency to model alternatives for one another and be open to more forms of reciprocity.”
Ms. Mattingly highlighted her work on the theme of what infrastructure to enable people to stay in a place affected by rising sea levels could look like, including wearable portable architecture, in which she presented individual inflatable shelters as an indicative adaptation solution, and portable habitats and ecosystems designed to provoke new approaches to maintaining access to food.
In SWALE, an ‘intentionally provocative’ project piloted during 2016-20, Ms. Mattingly created a public floating food forest on a barge in New York. The project addressed the need for access to fresh food in many of the city’s communities, and confronted a long-standing local law preventing foraging for plants on public land within the city.
“The plants that we selected need minimal maintenance, and unlike industrial agriculture they grow stronger each year,” she explained. “It was a place where people could pick food and learn to care for the plants, and it was also experiential, in that a floating mobile food forest began to feel stable compared to the city. This perspective shift is so important in bringing people to new understandings of what is possible for climate adaptation.”
In 2017, SWALE prompted the New York City Parks Department to establish a food forest in The Bronx. “If there’s additional interest from residents in stewarding edible plants, as SWALE created, then we see that this can move authorities,” Ms. Mattingly stated. “My work is about knowledge-sharing, building trust and generating public interest, and about art as part of coalition building. Coalitions grow and change when more people are involved, which triggers the public imagination, and ultimately leads to change.”
Freedom of movement, regularisation and legal recognition: Looking to regional approaches from Latin America
Ms. Olea highlighted examples of promising regional efforts on free movement in Latin America that may provide new possibilities for regular pathways for those affected by climate change.
The 2006 Central American Free Mobility Agreement (CA-4), enacted by Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, enables passport-free movement between these countries, alongside a joint visa programme that promises new possibilities for individuals coming from elsewhere to remain within the region. “Some questions remain on the key issues that push people outside of the region, such as assurances on conditions of safety, on employment with full labour rights, and on gender-based violence protections,” said Ms. Olea. “But this is a promising approach.”
Ms. Olea also highlighted the South American Conference on Migration (Lima Process), a platform for consultation on migration between South American countries established in 2000. “This process started with free movement and a residence agreement, the latter of which provides a pathway to permanent residence simply on the basis of being a national of another country,” Ms. Olea explained. “This too provides a promising possibility to move within the region, which is also attractive because common language and cultural elements make integration a little bit easier.”
Regional approaches to asylum within Latin America also have the potential to benefit communities and individuals affected by climate change. “Many countries in the region have incorporated the expanded refugee definition from the 1984 Cartagena Declaration into their national legislation, which is why we can now have promising conversations on climate change as a human rights violation or a disturbance to the public order in the sense of that Declaration,” Ms. Olea explained. “We can use those expanded definitions, alongside the future outcome of Consultative Opinion before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the climate emergency, requested by Chile and Colombia, to create what might be another window of opportunity in this context.”
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* The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) is a government-led initiative that brings together States, city mayors, business representatives, and civil society organizations concerned with migration and development issues. Its goal is to discuss a range of topics on migration, propose innovative solutions, share policy ideas, and create partnerships and cooperation in an informal dialogue setting. ICMC coordinates civil society engagement in the GFMD since 2011.
** For the 2022-24 GFMD, the six thematic priorities selected by the French Chairmanship were The Impact Of Climate Change On Human Mobility (overarching topic), Human Rights of Migrants, Diaspora, Labour Migration, Migration Narratives and Culture, and Multi-Level Governance.