A clear and bold heading

Official Climate Week NYC events calendar

Who Moves, Who Stays, Who Decides: A Conversation with Climate-Displaced Leaders

Gabriela Nalvio Melillo
Lauren Grant
Amali Tower
Climate Displaced Leader TBD
Climate Displaced Leader TBD
Climate Displaced Leader TBD
Event by: Beyond Climate Collaborative & Climate Refugees
Event format
Hybrid
Event duration
1 hour 30 minutes
Language
English
People have always moved in response to environmental change. What is new is the scale, the speed, and the profound injustice of who bears the burden. Communities that contributed least to the climate crisis face the starkest choices about whether to stay, adapt, or leave, often without legal pathways, resources, or recognition. This session, co-hosted by Climate Refugees and Beyond Climate Collaborative, reframes climate mobility as a justice issue rather than a security threat or humanitarian afterthought. It centers the voices of those most affected: a moderated panel featuring Global South leaders and individuals with lived experience of climate displacement, joining in person and remotely, in conversation with a New York audience. Panelists will speak to the realities of displacement and the fight for recognition, alongside where legal protections for climate migrants stand today, where courts and policymakers are beginning to move, and what a rights-based framework for climate mobility would actually require. The conversation will also confront immobility: the millions who assert their right to remain or lack the means to move at all, and whose claims to justice are too often invisible in migration discussions. The session takes place inside Retangle: Climate Disrupt, a month-long exhibition at Field Projects Gallery in Chelsea. The show is built around a sonic loom, an ecofeminist social architecture designed to hold collective work on climate migration and environmental justice. The setting is deliberate. Art reaches registers that legal and policy language cannot, and the installation asks visitors to encounter displacement as something heard and felt rather than counted. Situating a conversation about legal recognition within that work keeps the people at the center of it in view. Rather than a standard panel, the session pairs this discussion with structured audience engagement, inviting attendees from law, policy, philanthropy, and advocacy to identify concrete openings for collaboration. Participants will leave with a clearer map of the legal and policy landscape, and pathways to plug into ongoing work.