“Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe” is a thematic miniseries guest-edited by Sarah Koeltzow and Erica Bower, co-facilitators of the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation (CDCR). It brings together relocating community leaders, researchers, advocates and practitioners from across the CDCR to examine diverse experiences of planned relocation and identify lessons about what rights-respecting, community-led relocation looks like in practice and how national policy should enable it.

The series includes five ‘community perspective’ articles from the Americas, Asia and Africa, featuring the experiences and insights of coalition members from relocating communities and the organisations and researchers supporting them. An Introductory essay by the guest editors distils the experiences and lessons from the planned relocations spotlighted in the series.

The essay and the other articles in the series demonstrate that planned relocation is much more than an infrastructure project; it is a multidimensional process of economic, social and cultural rebuilding.

This final article in the miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, distils the experiences and lessons from planned relocations in Mexico, Panama, India and Malawi, as recounted in earlier articles of this series, co-produced by RID and the Coalition on Dignified Planned Relocation. The articles were authored by members of the Coalition, who accompanied or witnessed these relocations.

This essay, by the series guest editors, highlights the importance of community leadership, the need for “all of community” consultation and engagement, the importance of cultural sensitivity and responding to experiences of loss and grief, and the need to monitor outcomes over time. Critically, planned relocation isn’t just an infrastructure project; it is a multidimensional process of economic, social and cultural rebuilding.

Planned relocation is a unique form of climate mobility, and supporting the exchange of key insights from communities around the world is essential. That work is at the heart of the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation's mission.

This fifth article in RID's miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, examines the challenges of planned relocation in Malawi’s Lower Shire Valley after Cyclone Freddy (2023). Authored by researchers from the Malawi-based Initiative for Climate Action and Development (ICAD) and Refugees International, the article recounts the planned relocation experiences of three affected communities in that region, spotlighting the importance of social protection and the role of cash assistance in ensuring a dignified and sustainable relocation.

The authors identify challenges for climate-related planned relocations, including the absence of appropriate infrastructure in new locations, relationship dynamics with host communities, and access to sustainable economic opportunities for communities dependent on place-based livelihoods. They also offer recommendations on how to support communities in Malawi and elsewhere as they rebuild lives and livelihoods in places out of harm’s way.

The series is published in collaboration with the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation.

This fourth article in RID's miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, shines a light on the hardships faced by older people following planned relocation in the Indian coastal state of Odisha. The authors, researchers who have worked with these erosion-affected communities through the India-based network “Water Initiatives”, describe how older adults experience challenges to their cultural identity and traditional knowledge systems following planned relocation, including the fracturing of their relationship with nature, loss of sacred spaces, and ‘solastalgia’ – the acute distress and melancholia caused by the environmental degradation of one's home environment.

The paper also highlights the lessons learned from the lived realities of older persons undergoing planned relocation, including the need to pay more attention to the social, cultural, psychological, and care-related dimensions of climate vulnerability and, vitally, why approaches to planned relocations must be inclusive and age-sensitive.

The series is published in collaboration with the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation.

This third article in the miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, highlights the complexities of the planned relocation of the Guna island community in Panama, as they moved from their island of Gardi Sugdub to the mainland site of Isberyala. The author, an Indigenous leader, community member and trained biologist, played an important role in bridging government assessments and requirements with the Indigenous community’s distinctive worldview, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge—dimensions impossible to capture through externally conducted technical studies.

The Guna experience demonstrates that communities have the capacity to lead complex processes when they receive recognition, resources, and technical assistance. However, a truly successful planned relocation should not be measured by the completion or delivery of houses but by families' ability to adapt and live dignified and sustainable lives in their new homes. Outcomes at the new site must be evaluated over time and across generations.

The series is published in collaboration with the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation.

This second article in RID's miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, is an insightful analysis of the challenges faced by community members involved in a planned relocation initiated after the Puthumala landslide of 2019 in Wayanad, Kerala, India. Written by researchers who have worked with this community, the article details the challenges the community faced both during relocation and five years after moving to their new site, including promises made, implementation problems and the difficult realities of everyday life after relocation. Through the account, the authors spotlight important lessons for governments, non-governmental actors, and communities themselves about prioritising a community's shared infrastructure during development, livelihoods and access to employment, and access to grievance and feedback mechanisms. Above all, this article shows that planned relocation processes do not end when a new house is constructed; they require long-term support and monitoring for many years to come.

The series is published in collaboration with the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation.

This first article in RID's miniseries, Towards Dignified Climate Relocation: Community Perspectives from around the Globe, is a moving account of the challenges faced by community members of El Bosque, Tabasco, Mexico, who began to plan relocation in 2022 due to severe coastal erosion. Written by members of two organisations that have advocated for the community, the article recounts the successful legal and communications campaign that persuaded the Government of Mexico to support relocation, as well as the challenges faced during a planned relocation process that did not fully prioritise a participatory, rights-based approach.

The article calls on the Mexican government to remedy the harms to the community while ensuring better future programming through policy changes. It also offers vital lessons for governments, communities and development actors around the globe on community participation, transparent and constant communication, focus on economic and non-economic loss and damage and the need for continuous access to livelihoods, education and health services.

As the Russian war on Ukraine grinds on and the impacts of Ukraine’s resistance and counterattack spread inland in Russia, the conflict is taking its toll not only on Ukrainians but on Russian civilians, in particular, the large but underreported internally displaced population of Russians forced to flee their homes by the conflict. Building on an earlier piece written by the author for RID, this new research article examines the true extent of internal displacement in Russia and the growing challenges of IDPs, with particular focus on Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk, three of the most impacted regions. The article spotlights the inadequacy of official efforts to protect and compensate people displaced by the conflict, reflecting both the absence of the category of "internally displaced persons" in Russian law and Russia's apparent reticence to formally acknowledge the extent of displacement and, thereby, its responsibility toward internally displaced persons. This reticence, the article argues, is linked to increasingly dire national finances, depleted by the cost of the war and international economic sanctions. More fundamentally, however, it reflects the Russian government's unwillingness to acknowledge, even indirectly, that the "special military operation", now in its fifty-sixth month, has not gone according to plan.