Climate Mobilities and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change: A Right to Livability Going Beyond Loss and Damage

Climate-related mobilities, that is the range of consequences that climate change has and will have on human mobility, is a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon. Depending on the context, climate change can either induce more movement – more likely within than across borders – or more immobility, with varying degrees of agency in the mobility outcome. Yet, despite this heterogeneity, in the current international policy landscape relevant for climate mobilities, key institutions predominantly focus on cross-border movement. The global climate change regime under the 2015 Paris Agreement (PA) is somewhat more expansive in its consideration of the challenges climate-related mobilities pose. Yet the focus of the UNFCCC’s institutional arrangements with regard to mobility following the PA remains narrow: first, it regards displacement as the central problem requiring address; second, it consigns climate mobilities to the Warsaw international mechanism for Loss & Damage. Consequently, the current setup is both normatively and practically limited in its capacity to address the whole range of mobility outcomes resulting from climate change. In this paper, we propose a novel normative framework for addressing climate mobilities, grounded in a right to a livable space. We argue that this framework addresses the heterogeneity of mobility outcomes and provides justificatory grounds for utilizing the PA as a key governance framework. We show that the PA is advantageous in its capacity to allow for broader protection claims than competing normative paradigms, and that it circumnavigates problematic issues of causality and responsibility introduced by these paradigms. Crucially, we discuss ways to implement a livability right within the Paris Agreement framework. In doing so, we critically examine the normative scope of Loss & Damage (L&D) and its newly prominent place in the climate regime. We highlight how centering the practical considerations posed by climate-related mobilities can help clarify distinct directions for L&D. Given the recent momentum captured by L&D at last year’s Conference of Parties, our framework provides a timely foundation on which to base an institutional set up of climate mobilities within the UNFCCC that goes beyond where it currently stands.