Session 17.1

Climate-induced migration is an escalating humanitarian challenge, particularly in fragile regions like Balochistan, Pakistan. As environmental shocks such as floods, droughts, and resource scarcity intensify, they intersect with poverty, insecurity, and ongoing refugee inflows, particularly from Afghanistan, creating a multi-layered displacement crisis. Among the most affected are children and youth, who experience displacement not only physically but also psychologically.

This presentation shares field-based insights from the Youth Association for Development (YAD), a youth-led civil society organisation based in Quetta, Balochistan, working since 2002 on rights-based, community-driven programming. YAD has pioneered innovative, trauma-informed initiatives that support Afghan refugee and host community children affected by climate-driven displacement. 

These initiatives blend psychosocial care, education, and youth leadership to foster healing, inclusion, and long-term resilience.

YAD’s flagship initiatives include:

• The Refugees Trauma Support Hub (RTSH) – A safe healing space providing trauma-informed group support, peer-led sessions, and creative activities for displaced children and adolescents.

• “Relieve the Stress” Art Therapy Project – School-based trauma art programs in refugee-hosting districts, involving murals, exhibitions, and parental engagement to reduce stress and stigma among Afghan refugee students.

• “Supporting Mental Health and Healing” Program: A two-year initiative using play, music, and art therapy to reach over 1,280 children with psychosocial support and emotional healing, while also training youth facilitators.

Together, these interventions reflect a replicable model that integrates psychosocial support into education, refugee response, and climate resilience programming. Key elements include:

• Using art and play-based healing tools in under-resourced areas

• Embedding psychosocial care into schools and informal learning spaces

• Training displaced and host community youth as facilitators and peer mentors

• Engaging parents, teachers, and elders to reduce stigma and enhance community acceptance,

• Linking local NGOs with government and humanitarian actors for sustained, localised impact.

YAD’s approach demonstrates how low-cost, culturally rooted interventions can effectively address trauma, promote integration, and build resilience among displaced youth in fragile contexts. These practices are especially relevant where institutional mental health services are absent or inaccessible. The presentation also explores structural challenges such as limited donor investment in community based mental health care, weak integration of MHPSS in national climate migration policies, and barriers faced by undocumented refugees in accessing services. Drawing from over two decades of programming and partnerships with 39+ international donors, YAD advocates for centring youth wellbeing in climate response frameworks.

Key recommendations include:

• Making psychosocial support a core pillar of climate adaptation and displacement planning

• Investing in youth-led and school-based healing models

• Building local government capacity to address the emotional dimensions of displacement

• Strengthening coordination between the humanitarian, education, and development sectors

• Prioritising displaced children’s emotional recovery as foundational to long-term climate resilience

This session is relevant to humanitarian actors, development agencies, education stakeholders, and policymakers interested in youth-focused approaches to climate migration. It contributes to the broader goal of building institutional capacity to support climate migrants, not just through shelter or employment, but through healing, inclusion, and dignity.

Cities are on the frontlines of the climate crisis, increasingly shaped by both environmental pressures and human mobility. Migration—whether forced or voluntary—plays a critical role in how urban areas adapt to climate change, presenting both challenges and opportunities for sustainable development. This presentation explores the nexus between migration, environment, and climate change in urban contexts, highlighting how human mobility contributes to the resilience and transformation of cities. By examining case studies of climate-affected migration to and within urban areas, it will unpack the implications for urban planning, governance, and social cohesion. The discussion emphasizes the potential of migrants as agents of innovation and resilience, while underscoring the need for inclusive policies that integrate migration into climate action and urban development strategies. Ultimately, it calls for rethinking urban futures through a mobility lens to build greener, more inclusive, and climate-resilient cities.

Climate change is increasingly driving forced migration, particularly in Africa’s fragile drylands where ecosystems are highly vulnerable and institutional support is weak. Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) have become epicenters of climate stress, as prolonged droughts, unpredictable rainfall, abnormal lake expansions, and recurrent floods disrupt livelihoods, devastate pastoral economies, and erode community resilience. These shocks often force families to migrate—either seasonally or permanently—into neighboring counties and urban settlements, where they face new vulnerabilities of poverty, insecurity, and exclusion.

This presentation focuses on the lived experiences of indigenous groups such as the Ilchamus, Turkana, and Samburu, highlighting how climate displacement intersects with cultural identity, resource-based conflict, and marginalization.  While climate disruption has worsened food insecurity and triggered displacement, it has also revealed deep reservoirs of traditional knowledge and resilience. Indigenous strategies such as rotational grazing, clan-based conflict resolution, water-sharing agreements, and traditional weather prediction methods continue to buffer communities, though they remain under pressure from modern socio-economic changes.

Special attention is given to the role of youth and women, who, though historically excluded from decision-making, are emerging as leaders in climate adaptation. Through grassroots advocacy, community education, and innovative livelihood projects such as agroecology and eco-tourism, they are creating localized responses that deserve recognition and replication.

The presentation also interrogates the challenges climate migrants face in peri-urban settlements such as Marigat, Nakuru, and Nairobi. These include overcrowded housing, informal employment, gender-based violence, lack of documentation, and poor access to essential services. Such realities expose critical gaps between humanitarian interventions, urban planning, and the actual needs of climate migrants.

Finally, I argue for a more integrated institutional response—one that blends indigenous resilience with national and international policy frameworks. Key recommendations include the development of inclusive county and national integration policies, investment in community-led early warning systems, recognition of indigenous practices within Kenya’s National Adaptation Plan, and establishment of cross-border resilience frameworks for nomadic groups.

By centering voices from the grassroots, this presentation demonstrates that effective climate migration response must move beyond top-down policy and embrace lived experience, local agency, and traditional knowledge. The lessons from Kenya’s ASALs are not only relevant locally but also offer valuable insights into global debates on climate justice and human mobility.