Under the international law of State responsibility, a State must pay reparation for the injury caused to other States by its internationally wrongful acts. This chapter questions whether this rule could provide grounds for normative arguments relating to the treatment of migrants in the context of climate change. It argues that it could not. Certainly, States bear some responsibilities, not just when and inasmuch as they fail to comply with their obligations under specific treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol, but also when they infringe norms of general international law such as the no-harm principle. States responsible for a breach of a primary international obligation bear a secondary obligation to make reparation, in particular by compensating the injured State(s). This, however, does not justify the imposition of specific obligations on the developing States affected by climate change to adopt particular policies on ‘climate migration’ beyond international human rights law. Measures allowing for the resettlement of foreign citizens as a form of reparation, on the other hand, appear unlikely to provide an effective protection to the human rights of the individuals concerned.

In 2007, 2011 and 2015, the Council held special meetings to discuss ways of fighting the impact of climate change, including the possibility of deploying ‘green helmets’. There is a sense that the Council should have something to say on climate change, but the Council has struggled to define its role. The question of global migration flows has featured rather prominently in the Security Council’s meetings on global warming. Yet, these meetings have identified no evident concrete measures that the Security Council could realistically take to address either ‘climate migration’ as a whole, or even specific implications of climate change on human mobility. This chapter shows that the case for action of the Security Council in relation to climate migration is fraught with difficulties.