Join us for a screening of Under the Open Sky, followed by a short Q&A with Director Sonum Sumaria and Yumna Kamel of Earth Refuge.
In Under the Open Sky, Ahmed and his family – nomadic camel-herders from India – face an existential dilemma: to continue their traditional way of life or adapt to a rapidly modernising world. The film traces their quiet but powerful struggle to hold onto their ancestral way of life as they are increasingly displaced by industrialisation, climate shifts and economic pressures.
After the screening, Sonum and Yumna will reflect on the making of the film and further questions around climate crisis, displacement, land, memory and belonging.
This event is presented as part of the A Song for the Xeedho: the Knot Makers public programme. Presented at Whitechapel Gallery throughout Backyard Biennial until 6 September 2026, A Song for the Xeedho (Hey-ro) is an interactive installation that centres the Xeedho, a wedding basket made by Somali nomadic women which has become endangered due to the climate crisis.
Created collectively through weaving, ropemaking, and intricate knot-work, the basket is placed inside a cloth tensioned with knots that become a key part of the wedding ceremony. Ismail explores knots as objects that bind, create tension, conceal, and resist being undone, while also representing a survival skill essential to nomadic life.
Tickets: £5.00 (If the ticket price is a barrier, please contact [email protected])
A Song for the Xeedho: the Knot Makersby Fozia Ismail is co-commissioned by Counterpoints Arts and Whitechapel Gallery for Backyard Biennial. Public programme curated by Heather Marks.
PANELISTS
Sonum Sumaria is an award-winning British-Asian filmmaker and has been making films with marginalised communities for the past thirteen years. She read Spanish and Russian at Cambridge University, and studied at the Cuban film school EICTV, going on to complete an MA in Cinematography at MetFilm School in London. Sonum has a deep interest in nomadic and indigenous communities and is particularly drawn to the themes of identity and belonging.
Yumna Kamel is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Earth Refuge, the first legal think tank focused on climate displacement. She is a leading voice on climate mobility, legal innovation, and migrant justice, with a track record of building some of the field’s most ambitious public-facing initiatives. At Earth Refuge, Yumna leads work on legal education, advocacy and access to justice for communities affected by climate displacement. She has launched flagship online beginners’ workshops, co-developed the Climate Mobility Case Database and co-founded the upcoming Climate Mobility and Legal Innovation Programme (CLIP).
🗓️ Date: Wednesday 5 August 2026 ⏰ Time: 12.00pm – 1.00pm ET / 5.00pm – 6.00pm BST 📍 Online (Zoom)
Climate change is forcing communities to move, or stranding them in place, yet most people displaced by climate impacts fall outside the Refugee Convention and other established protections. The legal landscape is changing fast: litigators are setting favorable precedents in domestic courts, regional free movement agreements are expanding, and international courts are clarifying states’ obligations to their citizens in a warming world.
This session introduces climate mobility for lawyers new to the field, then turns to the legal developments now underway and the practical challenges practitioners face, including the difficulty of proving causation between climate impacts and a particular displacement. Join us for an accessible introduction to one of the most dynamic frontiers in environmental and human rights law.
🌍 Gabriela Nalvio Melillo, J.D., Ph.D., Director of Law and Policy Innovation at the Beyond Climate Collaborative. Gabriela holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in Environmental Policy from Duke University. She is a practicing lawyer, with a focus on expanding rights for climate migrants. Her research on legal protections for climate-displaced populations has been published in the Environmental Law Review, Nature Climate Change, Nature Cities, Environment and Security, and Frontiers in Climate.
🌎 Olivia Clark, Executive Director of Refugee Legal Support, which operates in the UK, France and Greece. Olivia co-hosted the first conference on International Protection and the climate crisis last October, and is the editor of the incoming UK Practical Toolkit on Climate Displacement. She has a decade of experience working in human rights and refugee law in Australia, the UK, South Africa and Afghanistan.
🌎 Kendall Jarvisis an attorney, consultant and expert in the field of disaster legal services, and is the the leading FEMA Appeals Expert in the arena of Disaster Recovery.She started the Disaster Law Program at Legal Aid and continues to help other communities impacted by disasters throughout California and consults with response needs in other states. Kendall has created numerous legal clinics and Know Your Rights Campaigns to help survivors in real time. Her expertise has led to significant policy impacts by drafting and advocating for valued changes in federal, state and local law.
Last week, Earth Refuge joined scientists, lawyers, researchers, and advocates from around the world at the Second Conference on Attribution Science and Climate Law, hosted by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Climate School, and Columbia Law School.
The conference explored one of the most significant developments in climate governance today: how advances in attribution science are reshaping legal accountability, evidentiary standards, and pathways to justice for communities experiencing climate harm.
We were pleased to contribute to a panel examining the intersection of climate mobility, attribution science, and legal protection. As climate-related displacement reaches unprecedented levels, the discussion centred on a pressing challenge: while climate change is increasingly forcing people to move, legal frameworks have struggled to keep pace.
The panel was moderated by Lauren Grant of the Beyond Climate Collaborative (BCC), who grounded the discussion with the following. In 2024 alone, disasters displaced 45.8 million people worldwide. Yet, people displaced by sea-level rise, drought, flooding, extreme heat, and other climate impacts remain largely excluded from existing international protection frameworks. Establishing legal responsibility for climate-related displacement remains one of the central challenges facing advocates, courts, and policymakers alike.
The session then opened with Gabriela Nalvio Melillo of BCC, who examined the strengths and limitations of climate mobility forecasting models. Her presentation highlighted an important reality for legal practitioners: while climate mobility models consistently demonstrate that climate change is driving displacement, they often struggle to capture the full complexity of why, when, and how people move. Understanding these limitations is essential when translating scientific evidence into legal arguments.
Our Yumna Kamel then explored how climate attribution evidence is increasingly being deployed within strategic litigation and advocacy efforts to establish responsibility for climate-related displacement and strengthen protection claims. Drawing on emerging trends from the Climate Mobility Case Database, the presentation observed that lawyers are already working creatively within existing legal frameworks to advance the rights of climate-displaced communities. Importantly, the discussion challenged the assumption that climate mobility protection can only be achieved through entirely new legal instruments. Alongside litigation, the presentation highlighted a growing ecosystem of complementary initiatives, including interventions before regional human rights courts, practical guidance for legal practitioners, and cross-disciplinary collaborations strengthen the field as a whole.
We then heard insights from Gamal Basha of Qore Legal, who shared practical lessons from the first UK climate-attributed human rights case in which he successfully represented his client in November 2025. His presentation demonstrated how carefully structured legal arguments, supported by robust climate evidence and expert testimony, can already secure protection within existing legal frameworks. Rather than requiring a wholesale rewrite of refugee law, these cases reveal how established human rights principles can be applied to climate-related vulnerabilities in meaningful and innovative ways. In a conference concerned with tracing causes and assigning responsibility, Gamal Basha reminded us of the measure that matters most: human suffering. It was a simple but profound intervention, one that travelled beyond the panel and resurfaced in the closing plenary as a call to ensure that the people living through climate harm remain at the centre of conversations about science, law, and justice.
The panel closed with Dr Katarina Velkov, who explored how recent developments in attribution science are beginning to close what she described as the structural gap that has historically shielded major emitters from responsibility for climate harms. Drawing on her work on shared responsibility for climate-induced displacement, Dr Velkov examined the implications of the landmark 2025 Lliuya v. RWE decision. Although the claimant did not secure a conventional victory, the ruling marked an important development in the legal treatment of climate attribution evidence. By rejecting the argument that an individual emitter’s contribution was too small to be legally relevant, the court signalled a willingness to engage with concepts of proportional responsibility and partial causation.
The presentation highlighted how attribution science is increasingly moving beyond its scientific origins to become a legally meaningful tool for establishing responsibility. Rather than viewing climate harms as too diffuse to attribute, courts are beginning to grapple with measurable contributions to climate impacts and the obligations that may follow from them.
For those working on climate mobility, these developments are particularly significant. If attribution evidence can help establish responsibility for climate-related harms, it may also strengthen future efforts to address the costs and consequences of climate-induced displacement. Dr Velkov’s intervention offered an important reminder that accountability and protection are deeply interconnected questions, and that advances in attribution science have implications far beyond litigation alone.
One of the conference’s greatest strengths was its commitment to genuine interdisciplinary dialogue. Scientists and lawyers often work towards similar goals but speak different professional languages. The conference created a rare space where attribution scientists, legal practitioners, and advocates could engage directly with one another, and initiating collaborations that will be essential as climate litigation continues to evolve.
For those working on climate mobility, these conversations are becoming increasingly important. Questions of causation, responsibility, loss, and protection sit at the heart of efforts to secure justice for people affected by climate change. Attribution science is helping to strengthen the evidentiary foundations of these discussions, while lawyers and advocates are exploring how that evidence can be mobilised in courts, policy processes, and protection claims.
We were also delighted to share updates on the forthcoming Climate Mobility & Legal Innovation Programme (CLIP), which generated significant interest among participants. As the field continues to grow, initiatives that foster collaboration between practitioners, researchers, and advocates will become increasingly important.
We extend our sincere thanks to Dr Joyce Kimutai for facilitating our participation, and to Jessica Wentz, Rebecca Lowy, and the wider organising team for creating such a thoughtful and accessible space for learning and exchange.
Most of all, the conference was a reminder that climate mobility is no longer a niche conversation. It is becoming an increasingly important part of wider debates about climate justice, accountability, and human rights. While significant challenges remain, the discussions at Columbia demonstrated both how far the field has come and how much momentum is building behind efforts to strengthen protection for people displaced by climate change.
Earth Refuge and the Beyond Climate Collaborative are delighted to announce the launch of the Climate Mobility & Legal Innovation Programme (CLIP), an intensive legal course taking place in Autumn 2026.
As climate change reshapes displacement and mobility worldwide, CLIP will equip lawyers, judges, academics, and advocates with practical tools to advance legal protection for affected communities.
On 20 January 2026, we hosted our very first online workshop exploring legal rights and climate migration for beginners. It brought together people from different backgrounds who share one thing in common: a desire to better understand how climate change is reshaping movement, protection, and justice across the world.
What led to the workshop
Climate migration is no longer a distant or abstract idea; it is happening now, and the law is racing (sometimes stumbling) to keep up.
Over the past few years, we have watched the conversation shift dramatically: courts are issuing landmark opinions, governments are being pushed to respond, communities are demanding recognition, protection, and accountability. At the same time, confusion remains widespread. Many people are unsure what rights actually exist, who is protected, and what happens when climate change makes staying impossible; or moving equally so.
At Earth Refuge, these questions come up again and again in our work, our events, and our conversations with partners around the world. There is clear interest, but also a clear gap: people want to understand the legal reality, not just the headlines.
This workshop grew out of that urgency. We wanted to create a space where people could step back, make sense of the rapidly changing legal landscape, and explore how climate mobility connects to deeper questions of justice, responsibility, and human rights.
Most of all, we wanted people to feel informed, grounded, and part of a growing global conversation.
What the workshop included
We began by going back to basics. Participants explored key concepts such as climate migration, climate (im)mobility, and the idea that people may have both the right to move and the right to stay. Interactive polls helped unpack common assumptions, including who qualifies as a refugee and how existing legal frameworks relate to climate change.
From there, we stepped into the evolving legal landscape. Participants heard about major international developments, national policy changes, and individual legal cases that are beginning to shape how climate-related movement is recognised and addressed.
The workshop also situated climate mobility firmly within social justice. Discussions explored how displacement intersects with inequality, colonial legacies and political decision-making, why some communities face far greater risks than others, and what each participant believes we need to do in order to make these fledgling legal rights stick.
Later sessions focused on recent legal shifts around accountability and protection, before introducing our Climate Mobility Case (CMC) database– a growing resource designed to track legal decisions, share knowledge, and support advocacy worldwide.
Breakout discussions gave participants time to reflect, analyse case studies, and share ideas about what meaningful legal protection could look like in practice.
Feedback
The response to our inaugural workshop was incredibly encouraging.
All participants rated the clarity of the content at the highest level, and engagement scores were equally strong, with the vast majority giving top marks to the interactive format. Overall satisfaction averaged 4.7 out of 5, with two-thirds of respondents rating the workshop a full 5.
Participants told us they particularly valued the balance between foundational knowledge and real-world legal developments. The legal landscape overview and the introduction to the CMC database were frequently highlighted as the most useful sessions, alongside the opening foundations on climate (im)mobility.
Many also commented on the structure and delivery of the session, describing it as well organised, accessible, and thoughtfully paced. The combination of expert insight, polls, and breakout discussions helped make complex legal material easier to engage with.
We also received constructive suggestions that we are excited to build on, including requests for deeper dives into specific legal frameworks, more time for discussion, and additional breakout opportunities earlier in the session.
Most importantly, participants told us they left feeling more confident in their understanding of climate mobility and its legal dimensions, and more aware of the scale and urgency of the challenges ahead.
Stay tuned
This workshop was just the beginning!
We are continuing to develop practical resources, including a UK-focused practice toolkit, further online and in-person trainings, and new ways to explore climate mobility through arts, culture, and community dialogue.
We are also expanding the CMC database and creating more opportunities for people to contribute with their knowledge, research, and livedexperience.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for this first session. We are excited about what comes next, and we hope you will be part of it.
In November 2025, we hosted a film screening in Islington, London, as part of the Our Shared Futures community film festival. We chose to show Thank You For the Rain (dir. Julia Dahr), a moving documentary that follows Kenyan farmer and climate activist Kisilu Musya as he documents the impact of climate change on his community, and later finds himself navigating the world of international climate negotiations.
We hosted the screening under Tiny Speck Productions and Onederful. Tiny Speck is a production company dedicated to telling stories with social impact, that, we hope, add a tiny speck to the big conversations of our time. Much of our slate explores themes of migration, climate change, and community, so we were excited to celebrate a film that so powerfully inhabits that same space.
One of our projects at Tiny Speck also sits directly at the intersection of climate change and migration, so we actively seek out and champion work that approaches these themes with humanity and imagination. Thank You For the Rain felt like a perfect fit because it is rooted in lived experience, and shows us what persistence and courage looks like in the face of overwhelming systems of injustice.
Onederful was born out of this same curiosity: how can art help us think differently about climate change? It’s a sister project to Tiny Speck, focused on celebrating creative work and social action that opens up new perspectives – emotionally, culturally, and ethically – on how we respond to the climate crisis. For us, the intersection of arts and climate is an interest, but it’s also an ongoing question: what kinds of stories help people feel connected enough to care, and courageous enough to act?
That’s why participating in the Our Shared Futures community film festival felt so meaningful, as it created a space where people could gather, reflect, and talk together. In a time when climate conversations can feel abstract, polarised, or overwhelming, there was something quite radical about sitting in a room with others and thinking aloud.
We were lucky to host the screening at ARC Collective, a beautiful venue in Islington whose values around community and social impact aligned so naturally with the festival. A local bakery, EZ & Moss, generously provided vegan pastries that helped set the tone for a warm, welcoming evening.
We invited friends, organisations, and local community groups to attend, and were genuinely moved by the mix of people who came along. The discussion that followed felt open and engaged. We offered a few guiding questions and highlighted particular moments from the film to help ground the discussion, giving people a common starting point while allowing the conversation to unfold organically.
We were also delighted to be joined by Monica Maghami, who had come straight from the COP30 conference in Brazil and shared reflections from being inside those global negotiations. In the film, Kisilu travels to COP21, and Monica spoke about how closely his experience mirrored hers.
The conversation ranged widely from people sharing their desire for a deeper relationship with nature, to critiques of Western cultural habits that distance us from taking responsibility, to reflections about the disconnect between what is agreed on paper at international summits like COP and what is enacted in reality. Others shared stories of local green initiatives they’ve started, or small ways in which they’re trying to live differently.
What stayed with us most was how the film gave us a common reference point – a human story – from which many different thoughts, doubts, and hopes could emerge. Hosting the screening reminded us that while films don’t change the world on their own, they can change the quality of conversation we’re able to have together.
We come from professional backgrounds in migration humanitarian work and documentary film making, so this festival was the perfect opportunity to combine the two and bring people from both our fields together, as well as the local community.
We chose to screen 3 beautiful short films:
And Still, It Remains (2023) dir. Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah Dead As A Dodo (2022) dir. Leena Habiballa Until The Last Drop (2020) dir. Tim Webster & Ernesto Cabellos
Many of the stories told in the films were ones that neither of us had heard of (the nuclear tests in the Sahara being a poignant one), and it felt important for us to play at least a small part in creating a space for these stories to be shared.
We were lucky enough to have Yumna Kamel from Earth Refuge join us straight from COP30 for a Q&A session at the end. The audience was really engaged and it made all the difference having someone who could speak to key questions around who climate refugees are, how their work at Earth Refuge supports them, and how we can all contribute towards creating tangible change.
Key takeaways:
Something that surprised us while we were coordinating the event was how open people in the local community were to supporting us. When the manager of the venue heard about the festival and our hopes and intentions for the screening, he kindly offered us the space for free, and local cafes were more than happy to spread the word. At a time when the political discourse on migration is increasingly led by the far right and feels poisonous, it is encouraging to remember that they are not representative of the whole. Whilst we are seeing a rise in fascist anti-immigrant discourse, we are also seeing communities increasingly coming together and mobilising against this. This sentiment was clearly felt throughout the event.
Film is an incredibly important tool for shared learning and to help facilitate these discussions, through highlighting the human element and human impact of climate displacement. It is a powerful medium through which to increase empathy and understanding around a subject that can often feel abstract and hard to quantify due to the slow and protracted nature of climate change.
Hosting the event was a great way to involve people in discussions, as high-level policy forums are often very exclusive, colonial, and Eurocentric. Films, especially when shared through community screenings such as these, create an opportunity to break down these barriers to access and make these conversations more inclusive.
Overall we loved the experience and would encourage others to host or get involved in similar local events. We are hoping to host more in the future through a monthly film night, to continue encouraging community dialogue around topics such as climate and migration. To find out more or to get involved, feel free to get in touch at [email protected] (@tea_chinn) or [email protected] (@poppy.kiddcarter) – we’d love to hear from you and keep connecting and building community networks in this space.
We are delighted to share the open-source post-conference report from the first UK conference on International Protection in the Context of the Climate Crisis, hosted by DLA Piper, Earth Refuge, and Refugee Legal Support in October 2025.
This report brings together the crucial learnings, reflections, and calls to action from the day. It is designed both as a refresher for those who joined us in person and as an accessible resource for those who were unable to attend.
The conference created a much-needed space for legal practitioners, academics, policymakers, organisers, and people with lived experience to engage with the urgent and evolving intersection of cross-border displacement, climate change and disasters, and international protection frameworks. The sense of momentum in the room was unmistakable, reflecting a growing readiness within UK legal practice and civil society to take climate mobility seriously and to work collaboratively across disciplines.
A central message captured throughout the report is that lawyers cannot work in isolation in such a politicised and rapidly developing field. Progress depends on collaboration with scientists, researchers, community advocates, artists, and communicators, and on ensuring that lived experience guides all work in this space.
The report also highlights why this moment matters. Climate-related displacement is already reshaping protection needs, with recent international jurisprudence and emerging national legislation signalling a period of rapid legal development and a need for creativity that reaches beyond traditional actors.
The conference closed with two clear calls to action:
🌍 Practitioners are encouraged to contribute relevant decisions to the Climate Mobility Case Database
🌍 A group of UK lawyers will begin work on adapting international climate mobility tools for domestic proceedings
We are grateful to everyone who contributed to making this long-anticipated event possible. We hope this freely available report helps sustain the collective readiness and momentum that defined the day and supports continued engagement with this critical area of work.
Earth Refuge is delighted to launch our first online workshop of 2026: a practical, beginner-friendly session designed to help participants understand the legal dimensions of climate-related mobility through real-world examples and the latest global developments.
About the workshop
This interactive session brings together clear guidance, real-world examples, and collaborative activities. With polls, case studies, and breakout discussions, we’ll explore how climate mobility is shaping policy, communities, and legal practice across the globe.
Come prepared to participate!
Who it’s for
Attendees of our recent in-person events: We heard you — here’s the deeper dive you asked for.
Legal practitioners: Entry-level, expert-led training to help you start integrating climate mobility into your practice.
Students (law, policy, migration, climate): The fundamentals explained clearly, with real-world examples you won’t find in textbooks.
COP30 marked Earth Refuge’s first time attending the Conference of the Parties – and what a place to begin: Belém, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. We arrived curious, cautious, and keen to listen. Our goal was simple but ambitious: bring the perspective of UK civil society into global conversations on climate and migrant justice, and elevate the voices and experiences of communities already responding to climate (im)mobility.
More than 100 civil society organisations signed our Open Letter – drafted under the banner of the Climate and Migrant Justice Organising (CMJ) Policy Working Group – to UK government representatives and COP negotiators, urging them to safeguard both the right to stay and the right to move in the face of escalating climate impacts.
With this mandate, we set out to raise the profile of climate mobility in rooms where the conversation often remains tightly focused on emissions and temperature pathways. We also went to learn; from communities, organisations, scholars, and activists working at the intersection of climate and migration across the world.
Expanding Legal Protections for Climate-Displaced Populations
At an event facilitated by our colleagues at RESAMA (Rede Sul-Americana para as Migrações Ambientais / South American Network for Environmental Migration) and hosted off-site at the Instituto Hounsou de Integração África-Amazônia, we witnessed first-hand the extraordinary work led by founder Israel, originally from Benin. Only a few years ago, the state of Pará had almost no infrastructure in place to support new arrivals; today it is recognised as Brazil’s most welcoming state for migrants. A progressive national migration law – easing processes such as marriage registration and access to essential rights – has made a material difference.
We were struck by Marilia Papaléo Gagliardi’s overview of RéSAMA’s Latin American network, which has mapped climate-related displacement cases across the region. The parallels with our own Climate Mobility Case Database were clear, and we are excited about what future collaboration could bring.
We also heard from Gabriela Nagle Alverio of the Beyond Climate Collaborative, who highlighted how FEMA funding patterns in the United States can influence who is able to rebuild after disasters – revealing stark racialised inequities in who stays, who moves, and who is forced into precarity.
Climate displacement solutions: bridging research and lived experiences
This session, which we co-hosted with the Beyond Climate Collaborative and the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, was built as a sharing circle – intimate, reflective, and deeply grounding. Bella Mosselmans of the Global Strategic Litigation Council emphasised strategic litigation as one tool among many, alongside activism and storytelling. Her intervention underscored the power of communities driving legal action themselves, and echoed what we see globally: different places, but similar struggles.
Interestingly, a recurring theme at COP30 and at this sharing circle was the oversimplification of climate mobility. We often heard, “Well, why not just address the causes?” But climate-induced migration is already happening, and affected communities have long been working to address root causes. The real barrier is political will – or, too often, political negligence. Reducing the issue to a single lever obscures the structural realities at play.
Political issues of environmental migration in the era of the rise of extremist parties
This may have been the most eye-opening panel we participated in. Moderated by Lauren Grant, founding executive director of the Beyond Climate Collaborative, and joined by Gabriela Nagle Alverio, Daniela Alba, Ibrahim Mbamoko, and Zenaida Luisa Lauda Rodriguez, the conversation traced the links between climate stress, political extremism, racism, and narratives of “threat” around migration.
We raised the situation facing residents of Hemsby on the Norfolk coast, where repeated erosion has left communities unprotected. We learned about the role of ecofascist ideology in several mass shootings – a sobering reminder of how violently climate discourse can be distorted and indeed, weaponised.
Yet the panel left us energised rather than defeated. Every contributor had come prepared with deep research, sharp analysis, and compassion. Many audience members told us afterwards that they felt seen, validated, and safe. That, ultimately, is why we were at COP.
Advancing climate justice: legal, artistic, and community responses
In a vast circle bringing together voices from Bangladesh, Australia, Puerto Rico, Pakistan and beyond, this session felt like a global tapestry of stories, strategies, and creative resistance. Art as preservation; art as activism; law as empowerment; practice as care. Everyone contributed with vulnerability, generosity, and courage. It was a highlight of our week.
We were due to speak at two further events at the Senegal and Uganda pavilions on 20 November, but these were understandably cancelled following the fire that broke out in the neighbouring pavilion.
Belém and the realities of COP30
The people of Belém welcomed us with warmth, generosity, and guidance at every turn. For this we are deeply grateful.
The militarisation of the summit, however, was impossible to ignore – especially upon our arrival in week two, after protests and counter-protests. While Indigenous voices were centred in many side events and community spaces we attended, this was far from the case across the broader summit: entry to the Blue Zone remained restricted, and Indigenous representation in the negotiation rooms was, once again, painfully thin.
Climate Rights International captured the contradictions of Brazil’s role well: a government promising to protect the Amazon while simultaneously expanding oil and gas ambitions. Their analysis highlights the gap between rhetoric and reality – a climate-leading narrative sitting uneasily alongside approvals for new exploration.
Negotiations: small wins, serious losses
The reaction from civil society has been clear and consistent:
Fill the Fund noted that while fossil fuel interests “bought silence” in the COP30 text, they cannot silence mobilised communities. Their assessment echoes a central frustration: despite progress on some fronts, finance – particularly for loss and damage – was left hollow. Harjeet Singh summarised the outcome succinctly:
A roadmap to end fossil fuels: won.
A commitment to a Just Transition: won.
Adequate finance: failed.
He warned that rich nations are “trying to escape their legal and moral obligations” by offering “vacuous pledges” instead of concrete commitments. The structure for action now exists; the task is to force those responsible to fund it.
World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
WWF highlighted “small wins” – incremental advances in language on fossil fuel phase-out and climate adaptation – but stressed that core goals remain “out of reach” without far stronger ambition and financing.
Colombia: mixed reactions
Colombia’s announcement of a parallel fossil-fuel-focused conference, to be held on Indigenous land in 2026, cast a long shadow. Many observers saw it as incompatible with the spirit of COP30. Local communities expressed disappointment at both the timing and the symbolism: a climate conference winding down while a fossil-fuel conference is prepared on their territory.
The UK’s post-COP pledge
Following COP30, the UK government announced it would not licence additional new oil and gas fields. However, as reported by Reuters, several previously approved fields will still go ahead, and the government is maintaining its current tax regime. The pledge represents movement – but not the decisive shift required to align with global 1.5°C pathways.
Looking ahead
Whatever the shortcomings of international negotiations, we remain committed to our work. Across panels, circles, and conversations, we found powerful alignment: communities are organising; researchers are advancing the evidence; litigators are pushing boundaries; artists are preserving memory; activists are standing firm.
Earth Refuge, alongside colleagues around the world, is already planning initiatives for 2026 and beyond. Our commitment to climate mobility justice – to the right to stay, the right to move, and the right to dignity – has only deepened.
Belém gave us clarity, connection, and conviction. Most importantly, it reminded us that solutions already exist within communities. Our role is to amplify, collaborate, and protect the space for those solutions to thrive.
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