While much of the world was still preoccupied with scenes of people arriving at Europe's external borders in 2015 and the search for solutions to the crisis of migration that these scenes were widely taken to represent, in a setting that could not contrast more with the rawness of life and refuge being depicted in the viral images beaming their way around the world, negotiators from around the globe gathered in Paris for the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The bureaucratic, meticulous and technical world of climate change negotiations was, however, being explicitly connected to these emotional images, amid warnings that climate change would be the ‘Syria refugee crisis times 100’ (Toles, 2015). The prominence of the topic of the large-scale displacement of people thus reportedly added ‘an ominous, politically sensitive undercurrent in the talks and side events’ in Paris (Chan, 2015). In a COP that was already being seen as highly relevant for the policy community on migration and climate change due to the large coordinated advocacy effort leading up to it, events playing out beyond the walls of the conference arguably brought even more relevance to this policy juncture.

Leading into the COP21, human mobility was already anchored in two UNFCCC texts agreed at high level. The first mention is within the Cancun Adaptation Framework, where ‘migration, displacement and planned relocation’ (UNFCCC, 2010: paragraph 14(f)) features as an aspect of adaptation where more knowledge and understanding is required. The second mention of human mobility is in the Doha decision, which acknowledged work being undertaken to advance understanding of loss and damage, one aspect of which is ‘how impacts of climate change are affecting patterns of migration, displacement and human mobility’ (UNFCCC, 2013: 3/CP.18 7(a)(vi)). Therefore, the Paris decision adds to these two references, this time establishing