By Carol Khorramchahi
Pacific Island governments are turning climate migration into a rights issue, asking not only where people will move but who gets to decide.
Votua Lalai village on Fiji’s Coral Coast
For Pacific Island communities, climate relocation is not a future problem. It is a question already entering village meetings, government plans and family conversations. When seawater reaches homes more often, when crops fail because soil turns salty or when land slowly disappears, the hardest question is not only whether people should move. It is how they can move without losing who they are.
That question became more concrete on March 4, 2026, when Pacific Island governments launched what Human Rights Watch described as the world’s first regional guidance on climate-related planned relocation grounded in human rights principles. The Pacific Regional Guidance on Planned Relocation is meant to help governments manage relocation before disaster forces people out, while protecting dignity, culture and community decision-making.
The idea sounds technical, but its impact is deeply human. “Relocation with rights” means that moving people should not be treated as a simple engineering project. It is not only about building houses on higher ground. It is about asking who owns the new land, what happens to customary land ties, how burial grounds and sacred places are remembered and whether a community has real power to say yes, no or not yet.
The Pacific guidance builds on the Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility endorsed by Pacific Islands Forum leaders in 2023, which calls for climate-related movement to be rights-based, people-centered and rooted in Pacific values. The framework names cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and dignity as central parts of climate mobility, not side concerns.
That matters because relocation can protect people while also harming them at the same time. Human Rights Watch’s 2025 report on Walande, an Indigenous community in the Solomon Islands, described how repeated flooding and limited land pushed residents toward community-led relocation to mainland Malaita. But it also warned that insecure land tenure and inadequate government support can compound harm, leaving people safer from the sea but exposed to new struggles over housing, livelihoods and belonging.
Erica Bower, a climate displacement researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the regional guide recognizes that planned relocation should be a “measure of last resort” and must protect communities’ “rights, dignity, and self-determination.”
Fiji has already shown how complicated this can be. The country has become one of the world’s clearest examples of climate relocation, with villages facing rising seas, coastal erosion and flooding. Recent reporting on Fijian villages describes communities trying to move uphill while still protecting ties to land, ancestors and village identity.
This is why the new Pacific guidance has importance beyond the region. Around the world, climate relocation is often discussed as a last chapter, something that happens when adaptation fails. Pacific Island governments are treating it as a governance question before the worst happens. Who decides? Who pays? Who protects land rights? Who makes sure the new site has water, schools, healthcare and jobs?
Sea-level rise is changing geography. The Pacific’s new guidance is about making sure those changes do not erase communities’ rights with them.
GET INVOLVED:
Follow climate mobility work through the Platform on Disaster Displacement and IOM Pacific. Learn more about rights-based relocation through Human Rights Watch and about Pacific climate action through the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat
Carol Khorramchahi
Carol Khorramchahi is a student at Boston University, where she studies English and Psychology and minors in Journalism. She enjoys writing and reporting on stories that bring together culture, identity, and community, and has experience in both newsroom reporting and digital media. She is especially interested in thoughtful storytelling with a global lens.