An international network of lawyers wants countries to commit funds to helping people forced from their homes by climate change

Villagers in the harsh landscapes of northwestern Alaska face a formidable journey. Sea ice and permafrost, the frozen subsoil that makes the land hospitable to humans, are melting. Flooding and erosion are blighting lives.

Climate change has taken on very real dimensions for these ancient coastal communities with their ancient names – Unalakleet, Golovin, Teller – where temperatures have risen twice as fast as the global average over the past half century. As government interventions have failed to ward off the elements, 12 indigenous groups have decided they want to move. More may follow.

They are not alone. From the Sahel, where women already walk up to 25 kilometres a day to collect water, to the island atoll of Majuro, set to battle increasingly regular and destructive high tides that wash away houses and flood roads, climate change is challenging the durability of people’s homes. In the long-term, many will need to adapt, or seek new lives elsewhere.  

As awareness of the potential scale of climate migration grows, an international network of lawyers is seeking to draft a treaty to help secure assistance for vulnerable groups.

Operating outside the UN system, the proposed Convention for Persons Displaced by Climate Change would see richer countries agree to give money to poorer countries, either to adapt homes so that people can stay in them as long as possible or to move communities in a planned way over time. It would also establish a framework for long-term discussion on the more fraught problem of rehoming whole nations lost to the sea. Importantly, signatories to the treaty would not be asked to commit to taking people from elsewhere.  

A draft treaty is expected by the end of the year, after which the team will start trying to persuade states to sign up.  

Climate migration – or displacement – has drawn increasing interest in the past five years as experts have piled into the field to analyse the likely human impacts of rising sea levels, desertification, glacial lake outbursts and more. Projections of the scale of movement still vary wildly, ranging from tens of millions to the oft-quoted estimate of Oxford academic Norman Myers who puts it as high as 250 million by 2050 (or one in every 36 people on the planet). But a clearer view of the likely impacts of such human migration is slowly emerging.

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