GFMD Side Event | Bridging Commitments: Supporting Resilience and Promoting Pathways for Human Mobility in the Context of Disaster and the Adverse Effects of Climate Change

Theme and Relevance

This side event aligns with the GFMD Roundtable 4: “Climate Change: Safe Labor Routes as a Bridge to Prosperity” and supports the broader GFMD 2024–2025 Chairmanship theme: “Regular Migration, Labor Mobility, and Human Rights: Pillars of Development and Well-Being of Societies”. The event will address and discuss the intersection between human mobility (including migration, displacement and planned relocation), and climate change and disasters. The event will focus on recent innovations in programming, regional cooperation, and policy development that seek to protect people on the move in the context of disasters, the adverse effects of climate change and environmental degradation.

Background

Disasters linked to natural hazards, and the adverse effects of climate change are amongst the most important and overlapping drivers of human mobility (including migration, displacement and planned relocation). Human mobility is increasingly becoming a key consequence and sometimes a necessary adaptive or resilience strategy for affected populations. The impacts of climate change and disaster-related hazards and risks — for example rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, floods, and extreme weather events—are often compelling people to move both within and across borders. 

The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) has progressively recognized the importance of addressing human mobility challenges in the context of disaster and climate change through inclusive, rights-based, and development-oriented policies and practices. One recent example of this is Roundtable 4 of the 15th GFMD Summit that focuses on “Climate Change: Safe Labor Routes as a Bridge to Prosperity,” providing a timely and strategic opportunity to showcase and amplify these efforts in policy and practice.

This side event seeks to build on the momentum of recent global and regional initiatives addressing human mobility in the context of disaster and the adverse effects of climate change and it also marks the formal launch of Switzerland’s new Global Program on Climate Change and Human Mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

The Program seeks to strengthen cooperation, protection, and resilience-building for people on the move due to environmental factors, through partnerships with key stakeholders such as the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), a State-led initiative established to follow up on the work of the Nansen Initiative, launched by Switzerland and Norway in 2012, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the Mixed Migration Center (MMC), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission and the African Union Commission (AUC).

The aide event will also draw on the long-standing collaboration between Chile and the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), particularly in regional and multilateral spaces such as the South American Conference on Migration (SACM) and the Cartagena+40 Process. Chile’s active engagement and leadership in these fora reflects a shared commitment to advancing protection and cooperation on disaster displacement. In this context, the event will feature the Chile Declaration and Plan of Action 2024-2030, a landmark outcome of the Cartagena+40 Process that underscores the importance of regional solidarity, human rights, and coordinated responses to displacement and other forms of human mobility in the context of disasters and climate change.

Together, these developments underscore a shared commitment to advancing coordinated, inclusive, and anticipatory responses to climate change-related human mobility grounded in human rights, regional solidarity, and regional and international cooperation.

Objectives

1. To showcase new global and regional initiatives addressing human mobility in the context of disasters and climate change.
2. To promote regional leadership and cooperation in disaster displacement and migration governance.
3. To catalyze dialogue and partnerships among States and stakeholders from different regions on practical and policy-based solutions to address and manage disaster and climate-change related human mobility.

Agenda

Cover photo: USIIC