By Emily Suu Myatnoe (Communications Intern)
Madhav Ghimire still carries the keys to his home. For years, those keys opened the door to the six-room house he shared with his partner in Devighat, Nepal. Then, on August 26, 2026, a catastrophic flood tore through communities along the Trishuli River after part of the Langtang Lirung glacier collapsed near Nepal's border with China's Tibet region. When Ghimire returned, the landscape had changed so dramatically that he could no longer tell where his house once stood.
He kept the keys anyway.
“Though I lost everything, I have still carried the keys of my home,” Ghimire told Reuters. “It gives me a sense that I have everything.”
His story captures something that statistics about climate displacement can struggle to convey, that displacement is not simply movement from one place to another. It often means losing a home, a livelihood, a community, and the expectation that there will eventually be somewhere familiar to return.
In Betrawati, another community in Nepal devastated by the flood, survivors returned to what Reuters described as an expanse of gray silt. Homes, businesses, farmland, and pieces of everyday life had disappeared beneath mud and debris. By September 18, at least 1,386 people had been killed in Nepal and more than 5,100 remained missing.
Scientists are still studying precisely what caused the collapse. Researchers with World Weather Attribution found that human-caused climate change helped create conditions that made the disaster more likely, including glacier thinning and thawing permafrost. Average temperatures in the Himalayan region were around 5 degrees Celsius above normal during August, with researchers attributing about 1.5 degrees of that increase to climate change.
But what happens after a climate disaster makes home unlivable?
Most people displaced by climate impacts remain within their own countries or move elsewhere in their region. But for those who need to cross an international border to find safety, another problem emerges: the legal framework for seeking asylum was largely built without climate displacement in mind.
A September 2026 report from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) examines this growing protection gap. The report notes that while most climate displacement happens internally, people who are displaced internationally by climate events face limited opportunities to reach another country through safe, lawful pathways. Many destination countries still lack policy frameworks designed to respond specifically to climate-related migration.
Even the language we use reveals the problem. Terms such as “climate refugee” may sound intuitive, but refugee status carries a specific legal meaning outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocols. Climate-related displacement does not, by itself, necessarily fit within the existing protection framework, which was created in the aftermath of the horror of World War II, at a time when climate change was not yet a driving factor of forced migration..
IRAP's research suggests that policymakers should avoid allowing the search for a perfect definition to become an obstacle to helping people affected by climate change. Instead, experts interviewed for the report emphasized identifying people's actual protection needs and using independent socio-environmental data to determine eligibility for potential pathways. This distinction matters because people do not experience displacement in neat categories. A climate disaster may destroy someone's livelihood while existing political persecution, gender-based violence, poverty, disability, or other vulnerabilities shape whether they can safely remain, relocate internally, or cross a border.
I was thinking about that complexity on September 24, when I attended “(Re)Setting a U.S. Policy for Climate Mobility,” a Climate Week NYC roundtable bringing together advocates and policy experts to consider how the United States could expand legal protections for climate-displaced people seeking safety and permanence. Eleanor Acer, Senior Director of Global Humanitarian Protection at Human Rights First, joined experts from organizations including IRAP, Refugees International, Haitian Bridge Alliance, the Migration Policy Institute, and others. One theme returned throughout the discussion: a meaningful response to climate mobility cannot exist in a single policy silo.
Climate displacement is simultaneously international and domestic. It intersects with immigration, housing, food insecurity, economic inequality, gender-based violence, disaster response, and human rights. Addressing it therefore requires communication not only between governments, but also across agencies, sectors, advocates, and the communities most directly affected. Acer emphasized the need to think both internationally and nationally, and both internally and across borders. Rather than relying on one immigration mechanism, she discussed the importance of a more comprehensive protection system—one that strengthens Temporary Protected Status, creates additional pathways to safety and permanence, respects non-refoulement protections against returning people to danger, and protects family unity.
Her comments also pointed toward a fundamental limitation in today's system: there is no single international treaty creating comprehensive migration pathways specifically for people displaced by climate impacts. That leaves policymakers with a difficult question: How can we be visionary about what protection should look like while still creating solutions that can actually be implemented?
IRAP’s report examines the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union, which created a dedicated mobility pathway for citizens of Tuvalu without requiring individual applicants to prove that climate change personally displaced them. But IRAP cautions that such a model is most workable under relatively narrow circumstances. That lesson is particularly important because not being explicitly excluded does not necessarily mean being meaningfully included.
IRAP also considers adapting existing labor pathways, which may offer more politically feasible and scalable opportunities for climate-affected people. Yet the report warns that labor migration programs themselves can expose workers to rights violations, meaning expansion must be accompanied by safeguards that protect the people those programs are intended to serve.
The September roundtable similarly explored the possibility of beginning where progress is achievable: at state and local levels, across existing sectors, and through policies that can demonstrate what works before being expanded. Participants discussed the need for stronger communication across government, accessible terminology and public education, and new coalitions capable of connecting work that may already be happening separately. Most importantly, any system designed around climate mobility must center the autonomy and experiences of people affected by it. Climate-displaced people are more than moving numbers, and their circumstances, reasons for moving, vulnerabilities, families, and hopes for the future differ.
Climate mobility will require difficult conversations about borders, responsibility, resources, and who receives protection. Those conversations are particularly significant for countries like the United States, which has historically contributed a substantial share of global carbon emissions while possessing resources that many climate-vulnerable countries do not.
But perhaps the first step is changing how we understand displacement itself.
A home is the land a family expected to rebuild on, the school their children attended, the work that supported them, and the community that surrounded them. After Nepal's 2015 earthquake, families in the Trishuli River region endured tremendous destruction, but some survivors told Reuters that they could at least return to their land and rebuild. After August's flood, that possibility disappeared for many. One teacher who lost two houses and saw her farmland buried under debris described the difference simply: “This time, we have lost everything.”
No migration policy can restore what the flood took from those families. But as climate change increasingly reshapes where people can safely live, human rights protections can help determine what happens next. The question is no longer only how governments respond when disaster strikes. It is whether people forced to leave will have meaningful choices about where they can go, whether their families can remain together, and whether safety can become something more permanent.
Ghimire still has the keys to a house he may never find again. The future of climate mobility will depend, in part, on whether losing a home also means losing the right to find another.
