From Baku to Belém: Making Climate Mobility Central to COP30
At COP30, global leaders have the chance to redefine protection for climate migration
Contributed by Global Governance Innovation Network, Stimson Center
Posted 17 November 2025
Editor’s Note: Justin Snyder is a young expert in the Global Governance Innovation Network. This commentary is part of the GGIN’s Next Generation Experts series in an effort to elevate youth research and writing. Justin Snyder’s interest and research center on climate, climate governance, and climate migration
By Rebecca Snyder, Research Associate, Global Governance, Justice and Security Program
Belém’s Test
As world leaders prepare to meet in Belém, Brazil for the 30th UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) this November, the Amazon stands as both a symbol of global interdependence and a test of political will. In April 2024, southern Brazil’s worst floods in eight decades submerged cities, displacing nearly 600,000 people — a stark reminder of what’s at stake as Brazil hosts the next round of climate talks. COP29 in Baku was billed as the “Finance COP,” but with more than 1,700 fossil-fuel lobbyists in attendance, its focus on funding targets overshadowed any serious plan to protect people forced to move by climate impacts. What unfolds in Belém will reveal whether the global community will repeat the complacency of Baku or confront the growing displacement already underway.
A System Built for a Different World
In 2024, global disasters triggered an estimated 45.8 million internal displacements, the highest annual figure on record and more than double the decade average. Rising sea levels, drought, and extreme weather have forced people from their homes, and, increasingly, across borders. Yet the global framework for refugee protection remains rooted in a world that no longer exists, one born of the refugee crises of World War II, not the displacements of a warming planet. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines protection narrowly, limited to those fleeing persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The UN’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR) guidance reinforces this narrow interpretation, excluding those displaced by famine or natural disasters from refugee protection. The 1967 Protocol expanded the Convention’s scope beyond postwar Europe but never redefined who counts as a refugee. As a result, people displaced by rising seas in the Pacific or drought in the Horn of Africa often find no legal path to asylum; courts and governments continue to rule that climate threats, however severe, do not meet the definition of persecution.
For now, the world recognizes the crisis of climate displacement but offers no path to safety. As droughts, floods, and food insecurity push more people from their homes, those most responsible for emissions remain least exposed to their consequences, while those least responsible are told to adapt. High-income countries treat climate displacement as a border problem, not a justice issue, prioritizing deterrence and control over protection and mobility. The result is a widening responsibility gap; those who caused the crisis remain the least willing to help those forced to move because of it. As climate-driven displacement accelerates and political will erodes, that moral failure is getting harder to disguise.
Over the past two decades, governments have acknowledged a gap in protection for people displaced by climate impacts but have avoided binding reform. A range of initiatives, from the Nansen Process to the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration, have introduced voluntary principles for addressing climate-related movement. The Global Compact for Migration (2018) acknowledges that climate change is displacing people but reaffirms state sovereignty, the very principle that governments use to reject binding rules on cross-border protection, arguing that such obligations would infringe on their control over borders. The result is a patchwork of national and regional responses that depend on political will instead of legal duty.
Human rights jurisprudence offers only partial relief. In Ioane Teitiota v. New Zealand (2020), the UN Human Rights Committee found that returning someone to life-threatening climate conditions could breach the right to life but stopped short of establishing the right to enter or remain elsewhere. The case revealed the limits of today’s legal system: It can name injustice but not remedy it. As environmental shocks intensify, today’s protection frameworks do not meet the urgency and scale of climate migration.
From Containment to Protection
Creating a “climate refugee” category would shift accountability onto those most responsible for the crisis, binding wealthy nations to new obligations and reviving long-stalled discussions of historical responsibility. Instead of expanding protection, high-emitting countries have securitized climate mobility, folding it into existing systems of border control. Policies framed as “resilience” or “adaptation” often aim to prevent migration, funding development and disaster-risk programs that keep vulnerable populations in place. The same logic drives migration policies more broadly: the European Union’s coastal surveillance and migrant detention deals with Libya and Tunisia, Australia’s offshore processing in the Pacific, and the United States’ framing of regional migration as a stability issue. These measures reveal how high-emitting countries are preparing to manage and securitize future and present climate migration. That same inequality is visible in how global resources are distributed. Seventy-eight percent of conflict displacement in 2025 occurred in countries with high climate vulnerability, yet these same countries received only a fraction of global climate finance. Fragile states received $2 per person in annual adaptation funding, compared to $161 in non-fragile countries. Together, these patterns reveal a system built to contain movement rather than confront its causes, preserving the inequalities that define the climate crisis.
After decades of political avoidance, there are signs that silence is beginning to break. In its landmark July 2025 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice affirmed that inadequate climate action can breach states’ obligations under international law. The Court made clear that climate harm and the displacement it causes engage duties of prevention, cooperation, and protection. It was a rare moment of legal clarity in a debate long clouded by evasion. Whether governments act on it will determine if this moment becomes a foundation for reform or another missed opportunity.
What COP30 Must Deliver
COP30 in Belém comes at a pivotal moment in the global climate agenda. Under Brazil’s presidency, the “Action Agenda” emphasizes people, equity, and implementation, offering a rare opening to make displacement and mobility central to adaptation and finance. Yet the question is not only whether COP30 can deliver policies, but whether governments are willing to act on justice in a moment when it is increasingly under attack. Existing models like the African Union’s Kampala Convention show that binding commitments on displacement are possible. As the world’s first regional treaty to protect people displaced within their countries by conflict, disasters, or other crises, it transformed principles of prevention and assistance into legal obligations. COP30 could do the same for climate mobility, embedding protections for those forced to move, creating dedicated finance lines for migration-sensitive adaptation, and setting global standards to ensure cross-border movement is managed with dignity and fairness. If COP30 can align its people-centered vision with binding mechanisms for climate mobility, it could begin to close the gap that COP29 left open. Whether the system evolves to meet those forced to move will determine not only who is protected, but what global governance itself is worth.
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