Open letter

Dear Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and COP30 Climate Negotiators and participants representing the United Kingdom,

As COP30 climate negotiations commence in Belém, participants must keep human rights, racial justice and just immigration policies at the heart of the agenda. 

In 2025, while climate impacts of heatwaves, floods, storms, and droughts rage on, we have seen lapses in climate and environmental legislation in the UK and around the world. 

We have also seen a significant increase in anti-migration and far-right sentiments feeding increasingly violent polarisation in the UK and around the world. As well as governments, the media industry (and prominent institutions/think tanks) have tended to sensationalise the threats posed specifically by climate-related migration, meaning that debates about it remain fraught and completely lacking in nuance, often not moving beyond fear-mongering. Rather than offering solutions to ensure the right to stay or move for local and international communities impacted by climate change, governments are choosing destructive and extractive policies serving corporate and billionaire greed for more fossil fuels and private border regimes.  

This is a critical moment for people and the planet. 

While politicians and public figures seek to “divide and conquer” communities in the United Kingdom by utilising migration, this is part of a wider strategy that includes reversing climate ambition. The significant cuts to the aid budget announced by Labour earlier this year, as well as the increased spending on defence both obviously impact climate ambitions in terms of conflict/war-related increased emissions and reduced funds for adaptation and disaster prevention/mitigation in the Global South.

Feeding fear of migration, including climate-linked migration, only ensures bigger budgets for border militarisation and increased surveillance on civil liberties, which also has consequences for the climate movement. In the worst-case scenario, the climate crisis will be weaponised in order to primarily maintain walls and wars, whilst requiring massive fossil fuel extraction to keep the machine running.  

Instead, we propose the “right to stay, right to move” framework to address climate change and migration with care and compassion for all. 

A recent SDG report showed the highest level of climate-related displacement in 16 years. This is happening in the UK, where coastal erosion is not being adapted, and communities are being forcibly moved from their homes, and countries in the Global South that were over-exploited by the Global North during their histories of enslavement and colonialism and so are now on the frontlines of the climate disaster. The “right to stay” means providing the resources for communities facing displacement to be resilient to climate disasters, including climate finance for adaptation and loss and damage each at the scale of hundreds of billions of USD a year. At the same time, many people are already using migration to adapt to climate impacts, particularly in the Global South, where upwards of 90% of climate-driven migration and displacement takes place. 

The “right to move” due to the climate crisis or conflict means providing safe pathways instead of insecure conditions to move, which make people even more vulnerable to exploitation and modern slavery. This right was recognised and enshrined in the recent Advisory Opinion (AO) issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding States’ obligations to climate change. This is crucial given that the responsibility for the climate crisis is (largely) in the hands of Global North actors. The ICJ AO also reaffirmed the obligations of Global North countries to cooperate to provide support, including finance, to Global South countries in line with common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

As COP30 takes place, we are calling on Climate Negotiators to recognise how the climate crisis is impacting people’s lives and work to protect them through: 

• Reject the “divide and conquer” narrative on migration and instead recognise that fighting for climate justice means migrant justice. 
• Commit to supporting the “right to stay and the right to move” both at home and overseas, through providing support including finance, capacity building for communities to manage climate impacts, safe pathways to at-risk communities, and immediate support in emergencies.  
• Ensure actions on local internal displacement and a national action plan on coastal erosion and flooding for at-risk regions in the UK. 
• Enforce existing processes and frameworks on climate and displacement to recognise that migration is adaptation, and climate reparations should be paid by historical polluters such as the UK if they fail to meet their obligations.

Our struggles and our solutions are interconnected. 

In the United Kingdom, we can draw a line in the sand against authoritarian plans to divide and destroy our societies, and we can build a better future for ourselves and for the world.

Signed: