Session 9.1

ABSTRACT

South Asia is experiencing one of the world’s largest internal migration transitions, with tens of millions moving from rural to urban areas each year. Many are driven by climate-related pressures in their home regions, declining agricultural productivity from erratic monsoons, riverbank erosion, cyclones, droughts, and salinisation. These flows feed into metropolitan areas such as Delhi, Mumbai, Dhaka, Karachi, Kathmandu, and Colombo, where migrants often inhabit informal or peripheral settlements. Here, they face compounded risks: congested housing in flood-prone areas, precarious jobs in climate-exposed sectors such as construction and street vending, and limited access to infrastructure that could buffer shocks like heatwaves or water scarcity. This convergence of migration, climate risk, and informality raises urgent questions about the adequacy of insurance and social protection.

This paper reviews evidence at the intersection of internal migration, urban climate vulnerability, and insurance provision in South Asia. It synthesises peer-reviewed studies, policy reports, and case examples to outline a framework for addressing the protection gap faced by climate-exposed internal migrants. While substantial research exists on migration patterns and a growing body addresses urban climate risks, little integrates these with insurance literature—public social insurance, employer mandates, or community-based microinsurance.

The review situates migration within South Asia’s socio-economic and climatic shifts. Rural–urban migration is multi-causal, but climate stress often acts as a direct driver (e.g., flood displacement in Bihar, erosion in Bangladesh) or indirect driver (e.g., drought-induced income loss prompting seasonal migration). Migrant flows vary—seasonal, circular, or permanent—but consistently concentrate in informal settlements with insecure tenure, poor infrastructure, and high hazard exposure.

Climate risk distribution is shaped by both location and occupation. Migrant-majority wards like Dharavi in Mumbai face recurrent flooding, while outdoor workers in Delhi, Karachi, and Kathmandu are vulnerable to heat stress. Construction labourers face combined heat and accident hazards; garment workers deal with poor ventilation and flood-prone workplaces; street vendors lose income and stock during extreme weather events.

Formal insurance systems—such as India’s Ayushman Bharat–PM-JAY, ESIC, or Bangladesh’s Shasthyo Suroksha Karmasuchi—offer partial coverage but are hindered by limited portability and documentation barriers. Work injury insurance is legally mandated in some sectors but poorly enforced in migrant-heavy industries. State welfare boards in Kerala and Tamil Nadu offer broader benefits but have low migrant registration. Microinsurance and NGO-led initiatives, such as BRAC’s and GK’s schemes in Bangladesh and SEWA’s in India, provide additional cover but are small-scale, low-benefit, and rarely climate-focused or integrated into city disaster plans.

Case examples illustrate mixed progress: Kerala’s welfare board has improved migrant enrolment but faces administrative and awareness gaps; Dhaka’s garment factories provide some on-site health services but no climate-related income protection; Chennai’s heatwaves in 2019 and 2022 exposed uninsured street vendors and delivery workers to severe health and income risks.

From the literature and cases, four policy priorities emerge:

1. Portability – Enable benefits to follow workers via national digital IDs, interoperable databases, and simplified registration.

2. Compliance – Enforce employer obligations in sectors with high climate exposure and migrant dependence.

3. Climate-linked microinsurance – Develop affordable products for informal workers, bundled with early warning or post-disaster support.

4. Urban integration – Embed migrant needs into municipal climate resilience plans.

Without proactive reform, climate change will deepen migrant vulnerability in South Asian cities, amplifying inequities and economic losses. Insurance, public, private, or community-based, can reduce this risk if designed for mobility, affordability, and integration with resilience strategies. By bridging the literature on migration, climate risk, and insurance, this review aims to catalyse policies that recognise migrants as rights-holders entitled to protection in an era of rapid climatic and urban change.

ABSTRACT

Climate migration is a form of loss and damage with both economic and non-economic components. Displaced communities suffer from the financial losses of their homes, land, and livelihoods, while they also grapple with the emotional and social toll of losing connection to place, community, and locally-based knowledge. Just as other forms of loss and damage, climate migration is disproportionately caused by high-emitting states, while its impacts are disproportionately felt by under-resourced communities who are also least responsible for the causes of climate change. Given this inequity, the loss and damage of forced migration can be framed clearly as a form of injustice as well as a form of violence enacted predominantly by the Global North.

However, current policy responses do not align with this analysis of migration as a form of injustice or violence. Instead, high-emitting states seek to avoid accountability for harms that can be attributed to their excessive consumption. Even what could be considered to be the most progressive and comprehensive climate migration agreement, the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty, meaning friends or good neighbors, is not freely given based on an acknowledgement of Australia’s disproportionate climate responsibility. Rather, it is an exchange of Australia’s allowance of controlled climate migration from Tuvalu for Australia’s ability to have oversight over all of Tuvalu’s security and defence related partnership. This agreement comes against a backdrop of heated strategic competition between the U.S. and its allies and China in the Pacific, illustrating the value of Australia’s end of the bargain.

However, if climate migration is truly a form of injustice and even violence against communities left without resources to confront it, the response to climate migration should be framed as an obligation. There should be no need for impacted nations to exchange their sovereignty for salvation from rising seas. Instead, there should be an urgency for reconciliation and an acknowledgement of all that cannot be adequately repaired. In this paper, I will analyze the shortcomings of the Falepili Union Treaty and reimagine a justice-based approach to climate migration. This approach is guided by the perspectives of global climate migration policy experts and community advocates in the Pacific from in-depth interviews I conducted at COP29 in 2024 and during site visits in the Pacific during the summer of 2025.

Reframing climate migration as a form of violence clarifies the need for reparations, not charity.

ABSTRACT

The changing climate and its adverse effects on human lives have gained significant scholarly attention in recent years. Numerous studies highlight the impact of climate change on human migration, with many focusing on estimates predicting millions of climate migrants in the near future. More recently, the idea of trapped populations has gained prominence, moving beyond the IPCC’s earlier focus on mass climate migration. A small yet growing body of work on the subject based on field research with vulnerable communities in developing countries has increasingly challenged this binary, noting that migration decisions are complex. It is not always possible to clearly attribute climate change as a driver, let alone a sole underlying reason for the decision to migrate or stay put.

Understanding (im)mobility in the context of climate change is increasingly complex, as they are shaped by environmental risks, personal aspirations, socio-economic conditions, structural barriers, and political dynamics. Apart from economic factors, a growing body of research on migration and immobility in the context of climate change highlights the social and psychological dimensions, such as place attachment, social networks, and emotional ties to the environment, in shaping individual and collective decisions. Yet, the scant literature on political and structural barriers, particularly the action or inaction of state shaping (im)mobility decisions, highlights a critical gap. This paper aims to address this gap in the climate mobilities discourse using a case study of a fisherfolk community in Dhanushkodi in southern India.

Dhanushkodi is located at the southern tip of Ramanathapuram district in Tamil Nadu, Southern India, at the confluence of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, just 15 miles from Sri Lanka.  Once known as the port town of Rameswaram, the village was devastated by a massive cyclone in 1964. Subsequently, in 1967, the Madras constituency declared the area uninhabitable. As part of the rehabilitation and resettlement efforts, the district administration allocated land to the cyclone-affected survivors, particularly fisherfolk, in the nearby Natarajapuram area.

However, the resettlement efforts proved largely unsuccessful, as the government allocated land without proper titles and failed to provide durable solutions for livelihoods or broader developmental needs. Further, caste-based spatial and occupational divisions within the Rameswaram fisherfolk restricted the Dhanushkodi community’s access to nearby fishing grounds. These structural barriers, compounded by state neglect, constrained livelihood opportunities and ultimately compelled the community to exercise agency by returning to the officially designated uninhabitable land of Dhanushkodi.

For over six decades, the community has lived in temporary settlements marked by severe infrastructural deprivation, with limited access to safe water, electricity, higher education, and basic healthcare. Today, around 250 fisherfolk families remain in Dhanushkodi while also maintaining households in the relocated settlement.

Dhanushkodi’s unique geography supports year-round fishing, while the cyclone-ravaged ruins and the site’s religious significance attract growing numbers of tourists, enabling the community to diversify into tourism alongside fishing. These opportunities, together with a strong sense of place, deep rootedness, and non-economic ties, sustain their continued presence in Dhanushkodi despite its high vulnerability to climatic events.

While the changing climate frequently threatens their existence, the persistent state neglect, on the other hand, including the denial of early hazard warnings and continued governmental efforts to evict them from both the relocated settlements and Dhanushkodi, further exacerbates their vulnerability and precarity. Dhanushkodi fisherfolk demonstrate resilience through their constant struggle against both the changing climate and structural challenges posed by a hostile social environment and government neglect, which ultimately rendered them homeless and landless.

Drawing insights from a pilot study conducted as part of ongoing PhD research, this study highlights the complex interplay between the role of state, community identity and evolving climate to contribute to the larger discourse on climate change and migration. It underscores the urgent need for a comprehensive and context-sensitive relocation framework, particularly in cases of disaster- or climate-induced displacement, as Dhanushkodi exemplifies that the consequences of a failed relocation plan can lead to climate (im)mobility, and long-term vulnerabilities that exacerbate existing social and structural inequalities.