From Cancun to Paris: The Coming of Age of a Policy Field

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview and detailed analysis of the central episodes of policy making on migration and climate change between 2010 and 2015. The first of these episodes is the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that took place in Cancun in December of 2010. This episode marked the first inclusion of the issue of human mobility in the context of climate change in a text agreed at the global level. The now infamous paragraph 14(f) of the Cancun Adaptation Framework, the provision relating to human mobility, invites Parties to undertake ‘measures to enhance understanding, coordination and cooperation with regard to climate change induced displacement, migration and planned relocation, where appropriate, at national, regional and international levels’ and has been a defining feature of policy making that has followed. One of the first attempts to follow up on Cancun was when UNHCR made climate-change-induced displacement one of the topics to be investigated during the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which opportunely fell on July 28, 2011.