We Just Want a Chance to Stay - Stories from Guatemala and the Borderlands on Climate and the Right to Stay

This field journal grows out of years of work at the intersection of climate change, displacement and human rights, and from months of field research and community dialogues that Climate Refugees carried out across Guatemala and the US–Mexico borderlands in 2024.

Across Central America’s Dry Corridor, families facing droughts, floods and crop collapse are fighting for one thing — the right to stay. Yet as climate impacts worsen, many are forced north, where border walls and detention centers have replaced the adaptation funds that could have kept them home.

Many of these reflections were written in quiet moments along the way. While climbing hillsides in Guatemala’s highlands, sitting with families in drought-stricken villages, or speaking with migrants in border towns cut off from economic opportunity. The voices shared here belong to people living at the heart of the climate crisis, asking urgent and universal questions: What does it mean to stay? What does it mean to move?

The Central America Dry Corridor is among the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua regularly rank among the 15 most disaster-exposed countries globally. For rural and Indigenous communities already shaped by colonial legacies, structural violence and systemic exclusion, climate impacts are deepening long-standing injustices.

Yet migration is not the dream. Again and again, people told us simply: “We just want a chance to stay.” Their words are the moral compass of this work. They remind us that climate justice begins with the right to stay, and extends to the right to move safely, with dignity and with hope.

Released ahead of COP30 in Belém, this field journal offers evidence and reflection for policymakers, donors and anyone concerned with climate justice: that meaningful climate finance and adaptation investments are the real border policy solutions. Because when a farmer says, “I wanted my children to have a future in their own country,” no further explanation is needed. It’s a truth that connects us all — we all want a chance to stay in our homes.

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Shrinking Options: The Nexus Between Climate Change, Displacement and Security in the Lake Chad Basin

Photo by Amali Tower/Climate Refugees

An estimated 38 million people from diverse ethnicities reside in the Lake Chad Basin. The populations that reside in and around the lake mostly subsist on farming, fishing and pastoral livelihoods. Of this population, about 17 million reside in the conflict affected areas of the Lake Chad Basin, with more than 2.4 million displaced, largely as a result of conflict which broke out in 2009 when the Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, more commonly known as Boko Haram, launched an insurgency against the Nigerian government, which has since spilled over into Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

While conflict remains the main driver of displacement in the region, the mostly subsistence farming population have been deeply impacted and displaced by climate changes brought on by the lake diminishing over the past 50 years.

In its 5th Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found climate change could increase human displacement as well as indirectly increase the likelihood of conflict by exacerbating poverty and economic instability.

Climate Refugees found exactly that when it traveled to the Lake Chad Basin to speak to experts and displaced communities living around the shrinking Lake Chad.

Climate change, in combination with political, social, and development challenges has affected people’s lives, which Boko Haram has capitalized upon to feed its insurgency and to create a strategic base of operations and stronghold from which to increase its strength and numbers.

While conflict forced many out of the Lake Chad Basin, many were first displaced within the basin for reasons of climate change as they searched for sources of water and arable land. That displacement further destabilized populations already vulnerable from poverty, and brought them into further contact with Boko Haram, eventually forcing their flight out of the region completely.

The international community has begun to recognize that underdevelopment and climate change are at the root of the ongoing conflict, which has uprooted people, disrupted economies and thrown the region into chaos.

Climate change is a disruptor - it increases the instability of the region, negatively contributes to conflict stressors, including displacement, which left unchecked, threatens to overwhelm weak political, social and economic systems that can further fuel conflict and threaten new ones.

We must recognize that climate change drives human displacement and threatens human security. If the international community is to address the challenges inherent in that reality, then political adaptation, namely recognizing climate change in the security architecture as a threat to international peace and security, will be necessary.  

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