Last week, Human Rights Watch hosted the launch of the “Coalition on Dignified Climate-related Planned Relocation,” a new global alliance working to ensure communities forced to plan relocations due to climate change can do so on their own terms and with dignity.
Over two days in New York City, more than 40 relocating community leaders, researchers, and advocates from across the globe—including those from Panama, Fiji, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Sweden, Germany, and the United States—came together to exchange lessons and build a collective strategy.
From these discussions, it was clear that while climate-related relocation is a measure of last resort, it is already happening across the world, often without government support. Few countries have national policies in place to guide these processes; even fewer have rights-respecting policies that center on community leadership.
Despite their different political contexts, leaders of coastal communities shared remarkably similar stories of having to face existential challenges and holding their governments accountable on their own. Their experiences illustrated that planned relocations can be fraught processes that threaten the rights of people and their communities—including to an adequate standard of living, housing, and land—when governments fail to support those at risk.
Grounded in these sobering realities, coalition members spent two days sharing lessons learned from different relocation processes and governance strategies. They also imagined how, if well-supported and anchored around a community’s own visions for the future, planned relocations could be a successful adaptation solution of last resort.
Coalition members focused around two main goals:
- Continuing to build cross-context solidarity and learn from one another.
- Advocating for every country with a coastline to adopt a rights-respecting relocation policy or governance framework.
The coalition affirmed that the tools already exist; what’s needed is political will. It is critical to move from principles to practice and to ensure that the most affected communities lead the way. As climate impacts intensify, planned relocation may become an unavoidable reality for more communities. Governments need to take climate relocation seriously, and this coalition intends to help make policies and practices more rights-respecting and community-centered.