Introduction
I met Rosmiati, a coastal fish seller, on Wangiwangi Island in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province in early 2020. Behind her huge smile and warm welcome, she expressed concern for changes she saw in the fish stock her community relies on. Rosmiati, like many women in this part of Indonesia, sold and processed fish their husbands caught. Rosmiati had access to an app—primarily for fish conservation—that also allowed her to track income and set aside small savings.Footnote 1 Simple financial mechanisms like savings clubs allowed Rosmiati to take decisions for her family’s future and be more resilient to the changing climate around her.
Climate change is contributing to large-scale displacement across the world, upending the ecosystems and livelihoods of small-scale fisheries, agricultural areas, and more. While there is little consensus on the scale, timing, or dynamics of that climate displacement,Footnote 2 clearly, small-scale fishing communities like Rosmiati’s are already impacted. As policymakers look for effective ways to finance rights-based mobility, existing international policy frameworks emphasize that voice and individual agency of those most affected matter. Effective financing can ensure that families and communities like Rosmiati’s are empowered to make their own choices about when and how to migrate.Footnote 3
This essay explores two examples of community-led financing that empower climate-affected people in preparation for movement, during displacement, and in search of durable solutions. These two examples—savings clubs and remittances—contribute directly to realizing crucial aspects of the rights framework applicable to climate displacement. Policymakers should seek to facilitate and bolster these community-driven mechanisms, for example by reducing bureaucracy, matching funding, and creating incentives for pooled action.
This essay starts by giving examples of settings where community-led financing is relevant. The essay then examines the rights framework for such situations, looking at the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, with acknowledgement of the normative gaps around climate displacement that still exist. With closer examination of two financing mechanisms, the essay argues that they enhance realization of the rights articulated in the previous section. The essay concludes with some recommendations on how policymakers can facilitate wider and more effective use of community-led financing so people are empowered to make dignified choices on climate migration.
Climate-Vulnerable Communities
Climate displacement is notoriously hard to generalize, with different displacement situations requiring different solutions.Footnote 4 This essay profiles two types of climate-vulnerable communities where people might move: small-scale fishing communities and agricultural areas affected by drought.
First, small-scale fishing communities: almost 500 million people are at least partially dependent on small-scale fisheries for their livelihood or food security.Footnote 5 Small-scale fisheries are particularly vulnerable to changing environmental conditions,Footnote 6 leaving families weighing decisions about how to stay, whether to leave, and where to go. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have made efforts to protect small-scale fishing and coastal ecosystems, often through empowerment of local communities around economic and conservation-related decisions.Footnote 7 For instance, about a decade ago, the Caringo Women’s Group in the Philippines started community efforts to prevent excessive fishing in the Mercedes Islands, allowing for recovery of the marine ecosystem.Footnote 8 In seeking to revitalize the ecosystems of coastal fisheries, some NGOs built savings clubs into their programming.Footnote 9 These savings clubs give fishing households and communities “a cushion” against many climate-driven shocks.Footnote 10 Basically, the resources increase communities’ capacity to adapt to changing climate, including through planning migration.Footnote 11
Second, agricultural communities impacted by droughts on arable land face hard decisions about when and how to migrate.Footnote 12 In slow-onset situations like these, people move for many reasons, with factors such as risk tolerance, family considerations and economic opportunities coming into play.Footnote 13 Sudden-onset disasters make it more likely that people will explicitly link environmental conditions to their migration decisions;Footnote 14 however, slow-onset events contribute to more pre-emptive and proactive migration.Footnote 15
In both examples, people might seek different paths to cope, often moving internally initially. As Elizabeth Ferris points out, some “people will look for jobs in other parts of the country,” emphasizing that “[t]hose with means will likely be able to plan their moves and cover their expenses in ways that make it possible for them to move.”Footnote 16 Others may remain in place until pushed out by sudden disaster or by government relocation.Footnote 17 Remittances—money sent home from family further afield—might enable the household to mitigate damages from disaster.Footnote 18 While remittances play an important role in recovery after disaster, evidence of their use to prepare for disasters and adapt to climate change is less robust.Footnote 19
Relevant Human Rights Frameworks
Despite the novel—and considerable—legal challenges posed by climate displacement generally, existing international law provides relevant frameworks for the types of displacement discussed above. It indicates that people in climate-vulnerable communities should be able to participate in decisions about whether, when, and how to migrate. Community-led financing can build resiliency to the worst climate shocks, empower decision making, and increase access to shelter, food, and other basic needs associated with movement.
The types of climate displacement discussed here are well-served by analysis of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (GPs).Footnote 20 While the GPs were drafted in the 1990s with conflict-induced displacement in mind, they have repeatedly been recognized as a useful source of law for internal climate displacement.Footnote 21 Climate displacement can involve more predictability than conflict displacement, and this notion of anticipatory displacement is encompassed in the GPs.Footnote 22 Warming seas and increasing droughts are known trends; what is unknown is the timing of extreme weather events, and/or evolving political and governance factors that contribute to displacement.Footnote 23 This is not to say there is a perfect mapping between the GPs and climate displacement—partly because, as Ferris notes, there are “difficulties determining the balance between voluntary and forced movement in the context of climate change,” at odds with the extant legal system’s distinction along those lines.Footnote 24 Certainly, in the scenarios mapped out above, environmental factors play some part of decisions to move but are likely not the sole cause.Footnote 25
Accepting that the GPs provide useful framing, we look to Section II (on protection from displacement).Footnote 26 Principle 5, which requires authorities to “prevent and avoid conditions that might lead to displacement of persons,”Footnote 27 carries ramifications for climate change beyond the scope of this article. Principle 7 covers specific relevant duties, including to “minimize displacement and its adverse effects” (7(1)), and to plan for “satisfactory conditions of safety, nutrition, health and hygiene” (7(2)). Principle 7(3)(c) emphasizes that “free and informed consent of those to be displaced shall be sought,” while 7(3)(d) notes that authorities shall involve “those affected, particularly women, in the planning and management of their relocation.”Footnote 28 Financial interventions can help secure these rights.
Turning to Section III of the GPs (on protection during displacement),Footnote 29 we likewise see areas where financial interventions can help secure rights. Principle 14 states that “[e]very internally displaced person has the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his or her residence.”Footnote 30 Principle 18 iterates the right to an adequate standard of living, including food and water, basic shelter and housing, and essential medical services and sanitation.Footnote 31
Financial interventions are also relevant to Section V of the GPs (durable solutions to displacement.)Footnote 32 Unlike conflict-induced displacement, there is no meaningful hope of return in many climate-induced situations, and so we turn to resettlement (within country or across borders) and local integration. For durable solutions, Ferris points to useful comparisons with development-induced displacement, observing that “with development projects, there is a long lead time which can be used to plan for fair resettlement policies and programs.”Footnote 33 Ensuring people have resources empowers them to plan for durable solutions.
Facilitated Community-Led Financing
Even relatively small financial infusions can help realize climate-mobility-related rights, enabling people to choose when and how to move with dignity. Two community-led mechanisms might help: first, savings clubs, and second, remittances. In both cases, seed money has been generated by the affected families and communities; the question is how stakeholders such as national governments, international organizations, and NGOs can expand the pool of money and empower people to use it effectively.
Stakeholders should look closely at bolstering community-led financing. Such interventions can be relatively cheap, enhance capacity to cope with climate shocks, and allow greater rights realization. Ferris notes that prevention can be harder than responseFootnote 34 —all the more reason to put money in people’s hands prior to sudden disasters, such that people can make their own preparations. Direct financing can also redress gender issues: Merve Erdilmen argues that, in the Syrian context, small loans, “enhance refugee women’s autonomy in decision-making for themselves and their families.”Footnote 35
Savings clubs can create resiliency: for example, the NGO Rare helps establish clubs in some small-scale fishing areas as “community-led groups that empower members to manage their resources.”Footnote 36 By creating capacity for long-term planning, the savings clubs both help people realize climate-migration-related rights, and protect the natural ecosystem.Footnote 37 These particular savings clubs were not built as climate migration models, but they have that impact: with greater financial resilience, participants are empowered with more capacity to decide whether, when, and how to migrate. By facilitating savings clubs like these, key stakeholders can help finance rights-based climate mobility.
A second example of community-led financing is remittances—money sent home from family members who have migrated internally or abroad typically for work.Footnote 38 While facilitation models are less well-tested, Sam Huckstep and Jonathan Benyon argue that remittances can be immensely useful, as they “go directly to shock-affected households, unlike much climate finance.”Footnote 39 Erica Bower and Charlotte Finegold point out elsewhere in this volume that remittances have been used to finance community-initiated relocations. And while Huckstep and Benyon acknowledge that “not all vulnerable households will choose to use remittances for ‘direct’ or ‘proactive’ adaptation,” they assert that almost any remittances increase resiliency in the poorest households,Footnote 40 giving families “choice in how they act.”Footnote 41 Remittances, even without additional facilitation, can help families plan movement, find shelter after moving, and integrate into new communities.Footnote 42
But are there ways for other stakeholders—governments, NGOs, and international agencies—to help facilitate remittances by increasing the pools (through matching, perhaps) and encouraging investments that respond to climate mobility needs? In such facilitation, communities would remain in the lead, but development actors would support their efforts.Footnote 43 As Lindsay Jenkins argues elsewhere in this volume, government matching or incentivization of pooled remittances can support resiliency and adaptation projects. International agencies can explore cash transfers—which, in displacement generally, are largely viewed as effective.Footnote 44 Why not use that approach in climate displacement, by matching family remittances with humanitarian cash transfers (with appropriate vulnerability weighting)? NGOs can be funded for programming that creates incentives for communities to pool some remittances in savings for climate resiliency, borrowing from the savings club model. Structured incentives like these could nudge communities to choose to strengthen property against climate shocks, diversify income streams, and support education (increasing adaptive capacity).Footnote 45 Much further investigation is needed: for instance, does matching remittances with know-your-rights programming about climate mobility options enhance the degree to which communities take adaptive action? Certainly, further exploration of how to use remittances effectively as an empowerment tool would be highly welcome.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Increasingly, people in some small-scale fishing communities and agricultural areas will need to decide whether, when, and how to move. They have rights in all stages of displacement— in planning, while displaced, and in the search for a durable solution—that can be better realized with access to resources. With savings clubs, communities like Rosmiati’s can plan better for their future options and make empowered decisions about when and how to move. Likewise, communities benefiting from facilitated remittances may be better placed to access rights in displacement and build toward durable solutions.
Stakeholders seeking effective avenues for financing climate migration should leap at the opportunity to engage with community-led mechanisms. Speaking from their positions at the International Organization for Migration and the Platform on Disaster Displacement respectively, Ileana Puşcaş and Lorenzo Guadagno assert that even though COP28 highlighted the need for appropriate financing mechanisms for climate displacement, there is uncertainty over how to do this effectively.Footnote 46 One key avenue is by supporting directly affected communities.Footnote 47 Facilitating community-led financing through matching mechanisms, incentives, or otherwise helps fill this gap, and rapid further study of effective programming would be immensely useful. Alongside other good practices, and with appropriate financial commitments, this can help change the face of financing climate mobility.Footnote 48