Climate advisory opinions boost Mexico NDC displacement measures

The community of El Bosque in México's southern state of Tabasco managed to use international courts' advisory opinions on climate change as leverage in recent negotiations with the Mexican government over its latest nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement.

The village, where most residents have already been moved due to coastal erosion, is the first in México to be recognised as climate displaced. Its residents have been calling for better treatment for themselves as other communities under threat, including in evidence to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights during its own climate change advisory opinion hearings.

México's widely praised NDC, launched during COP30, explicitly references the two advisory opinions, and includes a range of measures including better modelling to understand how climate change will affect population movement, a national programme of planned relocation, and a recognition that displacement is part of climate loss and damage.

Viridiana Lázaro is plastic-free oceans campaigner for Greenpeace México, which has worked with El Bosque for years, says the climate advisory opinions were “really useful”, not just for the community itself but because they gave the government a strong legal underpinning to act.