Climate change is displacing millions of people. Deterrence and hostile policies are no solution
The climate crisis is reshaping the world around us. Rising temperatures, extreme weather and environmental decline are displacing people on an unprecedented scale.
What happens when a flood destroys a home, when a farm can no longer support a family, when drinking water becomes scarce or heat becomes dangerous to work in? When staying put is no longer safe, people move.
This is where climate justice and migrant justice meet. And as climate change forces increasing numbers of people out of their homes and communities, that conversation matters more than ever.
Climate change is already shaping human movement
Climate change is not a future problem. It’s already affecting how and why people move.
Some people are displaced by sudden events like floods, storms, wildfires or cyclones. Others leave more slowly, after years of drought, crop failure, rising sea levels or extreme heat have eroded their livelihoods. Sometimes people move within their own country and sometimes they cross borders – often the reasons are mixed. And climate pressure often occurs alongside poverty, conflict, discrimination or political instability.
Public debate often looks for a single reason why someone moved, but real life isn’t like that. A family may leave because repeated drought has destroyed their income, because food has become unaffordable, because local conflict has worsened, or because all of those things are happening at once.
Climate change makes existing pressures harder to survive. It’s part of a wider pattern in which environmental impacts deepen inequality and intersect with political, social and economic pressures, pushing people to move in search of safety and dignity.
Most displacement happens far from the political spotlight
In the West, political and media narratives often focus on people migrating towards wealthier countries. But most people displaced by conflict, disaster or other crises remain within their own country or neighbouring ones.
The communities most exposed to climate harm are often in places with the fewest resources to adapt or recover. This means that low and middle income countries host most of the people displaced by climate change.
It also means that the idea of a ‘migration crisis’ threatening the global North is simply not reflective of reality. But this framing is often used to justify hardline policies – like expanded immigration detention and the rejection of alternatives or like sending people to other countries or stopping them in the sea. We’re already seeing this type of framing becoming more entrenched as the numbers of people displaced by floods, famines, droughts and disasters grows.
Policy has not kept pace with reality
Current international laws and national policies do not form a clear or consistent system for managing migration in the modern world. They are under pressure, full of gaps and too often focused on keeping people out rather than protecting people.
People moving in the context of climate change have often experienced serious trauma. They may have lost their home, their livelihood, their land and their community. But many still fall through the cracks of the current protection systems.
International law recognises many people fleeing persecution, war and conflict as ‘refugees’, and this affords them certain rights. It can also make it easier for them to legally relocate to another country.
But current legal frameworks still leave serious gaps, especially for people displaced across borders in the context of climate change. And if they’re not officially classed as a ‘refugee’, migrants may be more exposed to detention, deportation and prolonged uncertainty.
In practice, this means people may have a very real need for safety, but no safe, legal route to migrate or secure status, because the system simply isn’t designed with the impacts of climate change in mind.
When protection fails, enforcement grows
When systems fail to respond to human movement in a practical and human rights-based way, they often fall back on punishment.
That can mean harsher border control or deals that shift responsibility onto other countries. It can mean deportation, offshore processing, surveillance and – of course – immigration detention.
Immigration detention means imprisoning, detaining or otherwise restricting the freedom of a person while they await decisions on their right to stay and live in a country. People can be detained in prisons or in places that resemble prisons for unknown periods of time with limited legal support, cut off from family, work, school and normal life.
Detention is one of the clearest examples of how migration is treated as something to deter, rather than something to govern fairly. And it’s not only cruel and unjust, it’s also completely ineffective.
Detention as deterrence simply doesn’t work, because it does nothing to address the reasons why people move in the first place. Detention doesn’t make crops grow; it doesn’t provide clean water or prevent flooding. It doesn’t stop people from moving – it just pushes people into more dangerous routes in order to avoid detection, deepening the risks they face on the journey.
IDC has long argued that policy should be based on evidence. And the evidence shows that detention is expensive, harmful and ineffective – but there are kinder, safer, cheaper and better alternatives.
There is a better way
The answer to climate displacement is not to build more detention centres, harsher borders or more offshore systems. It’s to build migration systems that are fair, humane, affordable and effective.
This is where alternatives to detention come in.
Alternatives to detention are laws, policies and practices that ensure people are not detained because of their immigration status. That might include laws that ban the detention of children, policies that provide community-based accommodation for people seeking asylum, or systems that help migrants and refugees to access education, employment and healthcare.
These systems already exist in many places around the world. And outcomes clearly show that they work better for migrants and refugees, for governments and for taxpayers. They’re not only kinder and more humane – they’re also far more practical and affordable than detention centres.
But alternatives to detention are only part of the answer. As more people cross borders in the context of climate change, we also need safe and regular pathways so people are not forced into dangerous journeys or left with no route except irregular movement – like boat crossings or long hikes through the desert.
We need protection systems that reflect the reality of why people move, along with regional cooperation built around shared responsibility, not deterrence. We need early vulnerability screening so children, families, survivors of violence, disabled people and others at greater risk are identified and protected. And we need community-based support that allows people to live with dignity while their case is decided.
That is what a rights-based response looks like: treating people as human beings, not as threats, and building systems that are fair, workable and based on evidence rather than fear.
Climate justice cannot stop at the border
The climate crisis is already displacing people. That reality will not be solved by pretending movement can be shut down, outsourced or pushed out of sight.
If governments continue to respond to climate-linked migration with detention, deportation and externalisation, they will only deepen the harm caused by the climate crisis.
Climate justice cannot end with cutting emissions. It must also include protection, dignity and the right for people to move in safety when staying is no longer possible.
That means closing the protection gap and rejecting detention and deterrence as a default response. It means treating migrants and refugees like human beings, not threats to be managed. And it means ensuring systems that reflect the reality of why people move and how climate change affects people’s lives.
IDC is the world’s leading movement to end immigration detention.
And we are focused on solutions. There are fairer, cheaper and more effective ways to approach migration governance – that’s why we’re working to deliver practical alternatives.
Through policy change, IDC has helped prevent human rights abuses and secured a brighter future for refugees, migrants and their families all over the world.
Join us and help make immigration detention history.