Image

Climate & Global Migration Sessions

Shaping Policies that Reflect Dignity and Human Rights

During this session,
we will share ways that we can stand with people displaced by climate change within the US and around the world, through policies that reflect dignity and human rights. Speakers will describe how we can live out our long-held value to welcome the stranger by expanding pathways for safe migration and developing new safeguards for people displaced by climate change – while ensuring the dignity and autonomy of climate-impacted people to make informed decisions for themselves.

Following this session, participants will:
Understand what policies exist to allow people to move safely in response to climate impacts, and where there are policy gaps that need to be addressed.
Identify efforts underway to create or strengthen policies that offer dignity and protection to people at risk of displacement because of climate impacts.


Watch Session

Presenters

Kayly Ober, Senior Advocate/ Program Manager, Climate Displacement Program, Refugees International

Kayly Ober is the senior advocate and program manager for the Climate Displacement Program at Refugees International. She has over a decade of experience on climate, migration, and displacement issues, including working as a policy specialist for the Asian Development Bank; a consultant at the World Bank, where she authored the flagship report Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration; and a research associate with TransRe, a group based at the University of Bonn that explored the application of migration as an adaptation strategy in rural Thailand. Kayly holds a Master of Science in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from American University.

Robin Bronen, Executive Director, Alaska Institute for Justice

Robin works as a human rights attorney and interdisciplinary social scientist on the issue of climate-forced displacement. She has been working with Alaska Native communities since 2007 to create a federal relocation governance framework based in human rights. She coauthored the Peninsula Principles on Internal Displacement and was a technical advisor for the Brookings Institute’s Guidance on Planned Relocation. She co-founded and directs the Alaska Institute for Justice, a non-governmental organization that serves as a research and policy institute focused on climate and social justice issues, and is a senior research scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Josh Leach, Public Policy and Communications Strategist, UUSC

Joshua Leach is the public policy and communications strategist at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), an international human rights organization committed to working in solidarity with people in displacement. He has worked with UUSC for over five years, previously as the organization’s policy analyst. In these roles, he has focused on mobilizing UUSC’s members to take action on issues related to refugee rights, asylum access, and the impacts of climate-forced displacement. Josh holds a BA in history from the University of Chicago and an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School.

Watch Session

Click the play arrow in the lower lefthand corner of the video player, below, to watch the session.