Making Lawful Pathways Work for Climate Migration: Initial Insights for Policymakers

Executive Summary

The majority of forcibly displaced people around the world does not have access to lawful pathways to safe destination countries. While most climate displacement occurs internally, people displaced internationally by climate events face these same challenges to access safety. Many destination countries lack policy frameworks to manage climate-related migration. A core question is: How can lawful pathways for climate migration be additive to the existing, limited opportunities to migrate internationally through formal, legal means? This report analyzes key considerations in expanding access to lawful pathways for climate-affected populations, based on desk research as well as nearly 30 expert interviews with government officials, legal advocates, academics, and others around the world.

Section I of this report explores the pragmatic question of definitions and eligibility for lawful pathways: who should count for climate pathways? Experts underscored the importance of focusing on what serves people affected by climate change, rather than focusing on an elusive legal definition that can distract from or obstruct practical action. In operationalizing access, experts recommended relying on independent sources of data that consider socio-environmental factors to determine pathway eligibility.

Section II analyzes key lessons from two experiments with dedicated lawful pathways to serve climate-affected populations. First, the report explains how the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union model – with no evidentiary requirement of climate displacement and no restrictions on when beneficiaries use their visa to migrate – is most feasible only in narrow circumstances: where the sending country is categorically at risk of climate displacement, and where the destination country can absorb virtually all applicants. Second, the report considers how the eligibility criteria and application process for Argentina’s Special Humanitarian Visa prevented anyone from benefiting from the pathway to date.

Section III analyzes key challenges and opportunities in modifying existing lawful pathways, focusing on labor pathways, which may be the most politically feasible and scalable option, and discusses mechanisms to improve access for climate-affected populations. However, rights violations are often pervasive in labor pathways, and the report describes certain crucial recommendations to make labor pathways a more rights-protective option. 

The report concludes by urging governments to pursue options to improve access to pathways to meet current and impending climate-driven migration needs.

Introduction

Climate change is the single greatest driver of forcible displacement globally, and it will only increase in magnitude in coming years.¹ While most climate displacement is internal, followed by displacement to neighboring countries within a region, the scale of international displacement – and potential political and humanitarian consequences of it – is significant and growing.² Thus, although access to lawful pathways for climate-displaced people is only one element of climate mobility planning for a subset of climate-affected groups, it is nonetheless an integral element of future policy solutions.³ 

To date, most countries have not designed or revised immigration frameworks with climate migration in mind. Expanding access to lawful pathways for climate-affected people is critical both as a reflection of migration realities and as a moral imperative, given the vastly greater responsibility of destination countries for causing climate change.⁴

This report aims to provide insights and recommendations on how to leverage lawful pathways to increase the accessibility, political feasibility, and rights protectiveness of those pathways with potential to serve climate displaced people. The policy recommendations are purposely country-agnostic and applicable to a range of contexts. 

This report emerged from desk research as well as expert interviews with 29 people including: five current or former government officials, six legal advocates, eight academics, three researchers, six nonprofit leaders, and one international organization representative, across the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific.

A. Definitions and Eligibility for Lawful Pathways for Climate-Affected People

The most common question that emerges when contemplating lawful pathways for climate-vulnerable people is: “Who counts?”⁵ Experts highlighted a number of key considerations, starting with the importance of focusing on what improves access to lawful pathways for climate-affected people, rather than elusive legal definitions that can distract from or obstruct practical action.⁶ Second, experts urged policymakers to focus on demonstrating how climate migrants meet existing criteria for legal categories.⁷ 

Third, experts noted different challenges in different geographic contexts. For example, delineating who is a “climate migrant” in places like Central America is more challenging than delineating it in places like the Pacific Islands where sea level rise categorically will displace people over time.⁸ The fact that climate change drives migration from Central America is unequivocally true; however the interplay of climate factors with transgenerational histories of migration alongside other political and socio-economic factors requires distinct adjudicative tools and thinking.⁹

In operationalizing access to lawful pathways for climate-affected people, experts recommended relying on independent sources that consider socio-environmental data to determine eligibility, such as those provided by the World Bank Climate Knowledge Portal and the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative.¹⁰ Various public data sets consider the composite risk of displacement based on a country’s ability to protect its population and adapt. Governments should consider available subnational data as much as possible as well, given the typical variation of climate risk within a country. 

In designing access to pathways, policymakers must also grapple with tradeoffs: defining access at a national level is often administratively easier but less accurate than at a subnational level. Experts recommended various tools to minimize the evidentiary burden on applicants to prove climate displacement. They also recommended not requiring individual applicants to establish that their migration is definitively attributable to climate.¹¹ It is not a pragmatic expectation of the applicant and will be overly burdensome to the adjudicator.¹² Instead, external scientific and socio-environmental data can establish such a legal claim element.¹³ That said, individualized determinations should not be precluded: an applicant should be able to make the case why their individual circumstances require protection.¹⁴ Finally, to identify eligible individuals for lawful pathways, experts recommended governments partner with trusted intermediaries in civil society. 

B. Key Lessons from Global Experiments with Dedicated Lawful Pathways to Serve Climate-Affected People

To date, few governments around the world have created dedicated lawful pathways to serve climate-affected people. New Zealand created such a visa for Pacific Island countries in 2018, however it was rapidly discontinued due to Pacific Islanders’ strong preference for other policy responses (e.g., reducing emissions and adaptation efforts) and desire to remain in their countries, rather than a focus on resettlement.¹⁵ Mexico has a visa for people affected by natural disasters but the government’s failure to adjudicate applications renders it not a meaningful pathway to status or protection.¹⁶ Several key insights emerge from two other examples: the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union and Argentina’s Special Humanitarian Visa Program.

1) The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union: A Successful Model for Certain Contexts

The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union,¹⁷ announced in 2023, offers up to 280 visas per year to Tuvaluans to migrate to Australia: a compelling option given the existential threat rising sea levels pose for the country.¹⁸ The process, open to all Tuvaluan citizens, is to register for the “treaty stream,” managed by the Australian Department of Home Affairs, and then, if selected from the ballot, to apply for the visa.¹⁹ The framework allows individuals to use the visa as an insurance policy to migrate in the future, rather than the typical “use it or lose it” approach,²⁰ and does not have any prohibition on entering and departing Australia, facilitating circular migration.²¹ 

When it held its first lottery selection in 2025, 8,750 Tuvaluans applied: a significant number since the resident population of Tuvalu in 2022 was 10,643.²² Given the recency of the first lottery, questions remain as to whether the first arrivals to Australia are in fact migrating from Tuvalu (which has a significant diaspora population in the region that is eligible based on their citizenship) and what proportion of those awarded a visa have chosen to use it. Anecdotally, it seems many people may be waiting to migrate, which is not a concern given the small fraction of Australian migration this visa opportunity represents.²³

Notably, the Falepili Union is framed around dignity but is rooted in Australia’s security vis-à-vis China: a “migration-security deal.”²⁴ It requires Australia’s agreement before Tuvalu enters any security- or defense-related agreement.²⁵ While the details are necessarily context-specific, placing migration pathways in national security frameworks may expand political support for and investment in those pathways, including for climate mobility.

2) Argentina’s Special Humanitarian Visa: Lessons to Not Exclude All Intended Beneficiaries

Argentina offered the Special Humanitarian Visa, announced in 2022, to nationals and residents of 23 Western Hemisphere countries if various criteria were met, including a requesting party in Argentina, a “state of emergency” declaration in the sending country, and an application within six months of a disaster.²⁶ These requirements were so restrictive that no one benefitted from the pathway in practice. Among other limitations, no nationals of countries in South America were eligible, and the disaster declaration requirement excluded slow-onset disasters.²⁷ The six-month cut-off was too short: many people do not seek to migrate within six months of a climate disaster because they are still waiting to see if recovery efforts will occur.²⁸ 

The Special Humanitarian Visa Program was modeled on Argentina’s private sponsorship program for Syrians.²⁹ However, the economic crisis in Argentina by the time of the environmental humanitarian visa program, among other factors, reduced private individuals’ disposition toward sponsoring in the context of the humanitarian program.³⁰ Neither governments nor international organizations took on the financial responsibilities in support of prospective sponsors. Lack of communications strategy or partnership with civil society also limited knowledge of the opportunity and potential support to applicants.³¹ This experience raises questions about how to bolster and leverage public opinion and civil society engagement to motivate sponsorship in the context of climate-displacement, which may be less familiar to prospective sponsors than human rights violations in war contexts.

3) Recommendations for Crafting Climate-Specific Pathways

A pathway modeled on the Falepili Union, with no evidentiary requirement of climate displacement and no restrictions on when beneficiaries use the visa to migrate, is most feasible only in narrow circumstances:

• The sending country is categorically at risk of climate displacement such that there is no need to establish anything but citizenship of that country to be eligible. Climate is such an unequivocal driver of migration over time that it is irrelevant if there are multiple reasons for migrating; and
• The destination country can absorb virtually all applicants over time, thus eliminating the need to further restrict eligibility. This is possible where the sending country has a relatively small population and the destination country has a significant capacity to absorb immigrants.
  

Apart from the Pacific Islands, there are limited instances globally of countries fitting these descriptions. Furthermore, prioritizing migration access to such countries that meet this criteria – over access for other groups migrating for any number of reasons, apart from climate change – presents significant political and normative problems.

Destination countries seeking to establish new climate pathways that are limited in scale and do not require individualized determinations could offer access only to people from certain subnational regions of select countries. Subnational data sets provide objective criteria to define eligibility.³² Destination countries could consider alignment with labor needs, diaspora ties, or foreign policy objectives in addition to climate criteria in selecting subregions. Most importantly, governments considering such pathways should pursue bilateral, regional, and community-based engagement to ensure consultation with impacted communities.³³ The perspective of a pathway’s intended beneficiaries should be central to the pathway design and implementation.

A final lesson emerging from the Falepili Union and Argentina examples is on the importance of maintaining flexible levers to calibrate demand and annual entrance based on the visa. The Falepili Union model of awarding a small number of visas per year with no restriction on when the beneficiary utilizes the visa to migrate is a valuable tool for destination country policymakers and for the intending migrant. A dedicated climate pathway can start with a limited number of annual visas; then a government can reevaluate this number depending on how many beneficiaries migrate upon receipt of the visa. The Argentina case highlights the importance of governments retaining the ability to loosen or modify eligibility criteria to ensure that the pathway does not exist solely on paper.

C. Analysis of Key Challenges and Opportunities in Modifying Existing Lawful Pathways to Serve Climate-Affected People

Dedicated pathways to serve climate-displaced people are most likely to be apt and successful in limited contexts globally. In all other contexts, policymakers may find existing lawful pathways to be a more scalable, feasible option to provide migration opportunities to climate-vulnerable people. 

In exploring existing lawful pathway modifications, policymakers should recognize that the people most vulnerable to forcible displacement often cannot access any of them.³⁴ This is due to various factors, including the costs (financial and time) of pursuing a formal pathway, restrictive eligibility criteria, the small scale of most pathways relative to the need, and compounding structural forms of oppression limiting access to and trust in formal systems.

Various existing lawful pathways may be modified to improve access for climate migrants. Experts’ recommendations included:

• Adopt adjudicative aids for consideration of climate-related claims in humanitarian asylum, refugee, and parole processes, where climate could figure into assessments of safety to return;
• Consider extensions of country-designated temporary protections for people already present in destination countries whose displacement is related to climate or whose ability to safely return is obstructed by climate³⁵;
• Implement pilot programs to extend private sponsorship schemes to climate-affected people, building on existing private sponsorship frameworks; and
• Waive or reduce fees in student, family, labor, and other visa pathways.³⁶

That said, many of these pathways face obstacles to scaling to afford meaningful access to climate-affected people. Family reunification pathways often have massive backlogs related to statutory caps not amenable to administrative efficiency fixes.³⁷ Refugee resettlement could be increased drastically in scale, but the political will and domestic receiving capacity often pose monumental challenges.³⁸ At minimum, as an incremental measure, governments can begin by documenting the climate dimension of legal protections, even if the climate-basis of displacement is not the cognizable legal claim.

Of all types of lawful pathways that could be modified to serve climate-affected populations, labor pathways may be the most scalable.³⁹ Increasing and regularizing access to pathways that can meet the destination country’s labor needs serves their national interest.⁴⁰ Likewise, sending countries affected by climate change may seek this opportunity both for remittances and for a remedy to high domestic unemployment rates.⁴¹ A profound challenge, however, is the ubiquity of rights violations in labor pathways, as well as their lack of a pathway to permanency.

I. Case Study: United Kingdom Seasonal Labor Scheme

In the UK, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs licenses scheme operators to recruit abroad to fill domestic labor opportunities, with a national annual quota set by the government (peaking at 45,000 in 2024).⁴² To remain licensed, the scheme operators must meet certain performance indicators, including that almost all sponsored workers are successful in their visa applications, arrive at their place of work, and depart the UK at the end of the authorized stay.⁴³ Sending country governments often provide a long list of candidates from whom the recruiter selects workers. Since 2019, scheme operators have recruited in large part from Central Asia, based on language connection and diversification following the Russia-Ukraine war.⁴⁴ Recently, one scheme operator signed an agreement with Kenya to expand labor recruitment from agricultural colleges across Kenya.⁴⁵ While nascent and relatively unstudied, it is a model worthy of further research to understand how such a pathway may serve climate-affected people – with climate resilience benefits to their communities, too.

II. Pervasive Rights Violations in Labor Pathways

In considering labor pathways as a vehicle to address climate mobility, it is fundamental to recognize the rampant rights violations that pervade these lawful pathways. In the UK system, as in the United States and many others, workers may incur significant debt – formal and informal – in pursuing the labor opportunity.⁴⁶ In the UK, there is no guaranteed minimum period of employment: workers may be dismissed for any number of reasons, from crop failure to a disagreement.⁴⁷ Living and working conditions may be exploitative and inhumane. Racism and other forms of discrimination, wage theft, trafficking, debt bondage, and other forms of extreme abuse may be systemic.⁴⁸ Difficulty enforcing labor protections and the lack of jurisdiction to prosecute recruiters’ illegal conduct, among other problems, exist in the U.S. context as well.⁴⁹ Further, the absence of a route to permanent status or to bring family are further ways in which lawful labor pathways fail to respect rights.⁵⁰ 

A labor pathway that violates the rights of its beneficiaries is no solution to climate migration. However, innovations in expanding worker protections in labor schemes, if standardized across industries, could render the pathways a more viable option in the future. Some such work has begun to gain traction in the United States.⁵¹ For example, even as the United States has eroded standards and enforcement for seasonal agricultural workers, some multinational growers have maintained compliance with EU standards.⁵²

III. Recommendations for Making Labor Pathways More Amenable to Serving Climate-Displaced People

Climate migrants may face greater obstacles and incur higher costs of migration relative to some other types of migrants. Labor recruiters and governments are typically agnostic as to which qualified candidates benefit from an employment opportunity. To increase access to labor pathways for climate migrants, the following recommendations can make climate-affected applicants more competitive: 

• Dedicate a proportion of labor pathway visas to people affected by climate, either based on country of origin and a list of countries severely affected by climate or by partnering with government and non-governmental actors to select candidates;
• Incentivize employers to hire people impacted by climate, such as by reducing fees;
• Mitigate eligibility and application obstacles faced by climate-affected prospective applicants, such as by providing financial and documentation support and job training and licensing support to access international labor opportunities; and
• Align with foreign aid and private sector actors to bolster training for climate-affected populations and to subsidize certain costs to be more competitive for international labor opportunities.

Experts urged policy changes to address rights violations persistent in labor pathways:

• Ensure “portability” of visas so that immigration status is not tied to an employer;
• Require ethical recruitment practices, including recruiters paying up front costs, establishing a central database for matching opportunities with workers, and increasing the role of government over private actors;
• Leverage new trade agreements to set higher worker protections than the law provides otherwise; 
• Embed in lawful pathways formal collaboration with workers’ rights nonprofits that possess trusted relationships with workers to learn of serious grievances that may not otherwise come to light and to support workers in rectifying them;
• Offer access to free legal services for workers on labor pathway visas who have experienced worker exploitation or other rights violations;
• Ensure adequate funding of labor investigators to proactively inspect sufficient work sites across industries represented by labor visas;
• Resource diaspora affairs departments. Countries with strong domestic political interest in sending workers abroad – for example, because of limited domestic employment – may have the least leverage to ensure their workers rights are protected abroad. Ensuring diaspora affairs departments have sufficient resources to protect the rights of its workers, among other remedies, is key; and
• Offer permanence after several years of seasonal work. Lawful pathways that afford a path to permanence in the destination country may be politically fraught both in the destination country (given widespread anti-immigrant sentiment) and in the sending country (given fears about brain drain and total population loss). One option to mitigate these obstacles is to offer a pathway to permanence only after a set number of years participating in a temporary labor migration scheme.

Conclusion

This report discusses foundational questions of determining eligibility for lawful pathways for climate-affected populations, highlights lessons from two dedicated climate-related pathways; and considers the opportunities and challenges in utilizing existing lawful pathways, especially labor pathways, for climate-affected people. 

Experts highlighted that affirmatively expanding access to lawful pathways at scale may be desirable not only relative to irregular – and inevitable – movements of displaced people, but also relative to extensive litigation, which is having higher than expected success rates on behalf of climate-affected populations around the world.⁵³ The report includes recommendations that may be pursued immediately, without necessitating legal changes or significant political will as well as other recommendations that require coordinated action, legal and legislative changes, and significant political will. Finally, the report underscores the importance of beginning to explore mechanisms to improve access to lawful pathways for climate-affected people even if initial approaches do not reach the scale that will be necessary in the future.