It’s Time for Solutions! Addressing Displacement and Other Human Mobility Challenges in the Context of Climate Change Loss and Damage

This brief advocates for a ‘durable solutions’ approach within the UNFCCC to averting, minimising and addressing displacement in the context of climate change. With the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) now operationalised and the UNFCCC’s Loss and Damage landscape taking shape, this piece discusses how ‘durable solutions’ can serve to avert, minimise and address loss and damage associated with displacement.

Published on November 1, 2024

Loss and Damage and the Challenges of Human Mobility and Displacement Working Group and the Advisory Group on Climate Change and Human Mobility | idrp, IDPs, Disaster, Climate, United Nations

Cholistan,punjab,pakistan-september,8,2018,-,An,Old,Man,With,His,Solar,Panel,For

Displacement has been described by Walter Kälin as “the human face of loss and damage”, profoundly affecting human rights, well-being and development, particularly in climate vulnerable countries with limited resources to address its impacts. With the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) now operationalised and the UNFCCC’s Loss and Damage landscape taking shape, ‘durable solutions’ approaches can provide a vital means for identifying entry points for addressing loss and damage. Relatedly, addressing the losses and damages associated with displacement and other mobility challenges is vital to the achievement of ‘durable solutions’. This brief highlights the specific actions that the Fund for Addressing Loss and Damage and other UNFCCC stakeholder bodies, expert groups and organisations should take to support, prioritise and mainstream ‘durable solutions approaches’ into policy and practice. The brief also spotlights the critical COP 29 actions and decisions required for ‘solutions’.

This advocacy brief is co-published by the Loss and Damage Collaboration and Researching Internal Displacement. It can also be found also on the Loss and Damage Collaboration webpage.

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This advocacy brief was developed by the Loss and Damage and the Challenges of Human Mobility and Displacement Working Group and the Advisory Group on Climate Change and Human Mobility. Both groups are coalitions of practitioners, researchers, lawyers and activists working on human mobility at local, national and global levels.

Image Credits

Cover image: Cholistan, Punjab, Pakistan-September, 8, 2018. A man with his solar panel charges his mobile phone in a remote area of Cholistan Desert. Image credit: Farhan Riaz / Shutterstock.

Loss and Damage Collaboration logo: Sundarbans web, by the European Space Agency, Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by ESA, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

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Durable Solutions Under Climate Stress: Why Recurrent Drought Continues to Undermine Displacement Solutions in the Horn of Africa

By Guled Ali | Sep 17, 2026

This insightful article examines durable solutions programming to conflict and climate-related displacement in the Horn of Africa. Despite growing investments in durable solutions by development actors, the stated programmatic goals of restoring self-reliance, dignity and stability to displacement-affected communities remain elusive. Instead, climatic stressors, especially drought, regularly undermine the stability that solutions programming is intended to deliver. The blog calls for a fundamental shift in how durable solutions are understood in the context of climate change. Experience in the Horn of Africa demonstrates that durable solutions must be positioned not as a fixed end-state achieved once people have returned home or resettled elsewhere and pre-displacement conditions have been restored, but as an ongoing adaptive process that enables people and communities to build the capacities needed to adapt to future environmental shocks. Otherwise, the author argues, communities that appear to be progressing toward self-reliance are likely to experience re-displacement, protracted displacement and other setbacks as subsequent climate shocks erode recovery gains.

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