GLOBAL CLIMATE REPARATIONS IN ACTION
Across time, people have moved to survive, protect what they love, and carry culture forward. As the climate changes, that movement continues, shaped by forces that are not neutral.
Today, climate migration is too often framed only as crisis, threat, or displacement, obscuring the truth that movement is neither new nor unnatural. What matters is whether people have the power, resources, and conditions to decide how they move.
Rooted in Global Climate Reparations, Remain. Migrate. Return. offers a new lens for understanding climate migration and mobility, one grounded in dignity, self-determination, and repair while honoring the enduring relationships between people, place, memory, and culture.
People have the right to remain on their land with the resources and conditions needed to thrive.
People have the right to migrate safely and with dignity when movement becomes necessary.
People have the right to return to home, culture, and place whenever return is possible and desired.
Hurricane Katrina made climate migration impossible to ignore. More than 1.5 million people were displaced, and nearly 40% were unable to return home. Its legacy reminds us that climate migration is never only about movement. It is about protecting people's ability to remain, migrate, and return with dignity.
Published 20 years after Katrina, Remain. Migrate. Return. What Hurricane Katrina Teaches Us About Climate Migration traces those lessons and the framework they inspired.
Climate migration is more than a policy challenge. It is lived experience, cultural memory, collective action, and the enduring pursuit of home. Explore the reports, campaigns, and gatherings that bring the rights to remain, migrate, and return to life.
New Orleans, Louisiana
Filmed as part of Katrina 20 Week of Action, the Monarch Forum brought frontline leaders together to share stories, cultivate collective wisdom, and imagine futures rooted in belonging, dignity, and repair. Through conversation, ceremony, and cultural practice, all who participated affirmed that climate migration is not only about movement, but about the enduring right to home.
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SLIDELL, Louisiana
Members of Taproot's Krewe reflect on the lessons and lived experiences of Hurricane Katrina in an exchange that invites all listening to see climate migration not through crisis, but through dignity, self-determination, and repair.
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Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama
A public storytelling campaign rooted in the Remain. Migrate. Return. vision, placing affirming messages across landscapes that have been shaped and shifted by flooding and displacement before and after Hurricane Katrina.
By reclaiming public space and asserting the rights to remain, migrate, and return with dignity, the billboards' words and QR codes connected more than 8,000 people across these three Gulf South states to a growing vision for reparative climate justice.
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama
Frontline communities know what it takes to remember, rebuild, and shape what comes next. The Katrina 20 Local Planning Committee brought together people from across the Gulf South who have lived through Hurricane Katrina and other climate disasters to commemorate Katrina's twentieth anniversary while building collective power for the repair the region requires.
Through a week of story, organizing, prayer, ceremony, and cultural practice, the committee transformed remembrance into action. Their work was made possible through the partnership and support of Foundation for Louisiana, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Junebug Productions, and Taproot Earth.
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Bourge, Louisiana
As part of Katrina 20 Week of Action, #RideTheStorm invited people across the Gulf South and around the world to walk, bike, paddle, run, or roll in solidarity with communities forever changed by Hurricane Katrina.
Echoing the storm's 144-mile impact zone, participants moved seven miles in remembrance while supporting the Katrina 20 Community Control Fund for frontline organizing and community-led repair. View the participation map to see where organizations, businesses and frontline communities joined in.
Gulfport, Mississippi
As part of Katrina 20 Week of Action, Taproot Earth's Just Transition Lawyering Network, alongside Southern Power Fund and Gulf South to Appalachia partners, gathered movement leaders to support the work of climate justice through legal tools, shared wisdom, and collective courage.
global
Supporting the launch of the International School on Climate Mobilities (ISCM) latest cohort, Taproot's Colette Pichon Battle delivers Climate Mobility and the Right to Remain, Migrate, and Return, a powerful keynote address and call to action for anyone working at the intersection of climate, migration, and reparative justice.
