From Agency to Accountability: Putting Climate Mobility Justice into Practice

COP31 Policy Brief for Climate Mobility Justice

Grounded in five years of shared learning from the International School on Climate Mobilities (ISCM) and BCC’s (2025) Voices on the Move survey of emerging leaders, the COP31 Policy Brief offers targeted key messages for the actors shaping climate-related (im)mobilities:

1. Researchers and research institutes
2. Frontline communities and emerging leaders
3. Disaster risk reduction actors
4. Peacebuilding and conflict response actors
5. Legal practitioners
6. Funders, investors, and philanthropists
7. Policymakers and government ministries
8. Humanitarian actors
9. Storytellers (advocates, journalists, and artists)
10. Private sector and business

At COP30, we called for climate mobility to be recognised not as a crisis to manage, but as a site of justice, agency, dignity, and systemic transformation. This brief asks a narrower, harder question: what does a just approach to climate (im)mobilities actually look like in practice, and what does it require of each of us?

Built on BCC’s emerging Just-SHAPE framework for climate mobility justice, the brief names the assumptions each group currently works under, reframes them, and sets out concrete recommendations. Across every group, the messages converge on the same demands: share authority from the start; treat staying, moving, returning, and rebuilding as equally legitimate outcomes; pair resilience with accountability and repair; recognise lived experience as expertise; and back commitments with real resources and structures.

Communities should not be asked to adapt indefinitely to conditions they did not create. At COP31, decision-makers face a clear test: will they keep treating participation as consultation after the fact, or will they share real decision-making power with the people whose lives and futures are at stake, and answer for the harms that drive displacement?

None of these actors can deliver justice alone. Let COP31 be the moment we move from agency to accountability, and put climate mobility justice into practice.