Distributing Winning Lottery Tickets: Why Circular Migration Programmes Should Target the Climate Vulnerable

Every year, high-income countries recruit hundreds of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers on temporary visas, handing out what can, in effect, be winning lottery tickets. A six-month stint on a seasonal agricultural visa can give a low-income worker the equivalent of years of normal earnings in a single season. Circular (short-term, repeated) migration schemes have few to no prerequisites and are relatively politically durable: these schemes already exist, enjoy strong employer support, and rarely feature in immigration debates. Yet these visas are generally distributed with little reference to development outcomes— including climate adaptation.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Debates rage over how to fill a gaping adaptation finance hole: public adaptation finance falls far short of needs, and efforts to “mobilise” private finance for adaptation have largely disappointed. Remittances, meanwhile, can have transformative effects for adaptation to climate shocks.

The vast potential of circular programmes for adaptation means that access should be deliberately oriented towards low-income climate-vulnerable populations. If access to these visas were targeted towards such groups, the resulting remittances would be life-changing for households. They could also, we argue, count as mobilised private climate finance—with mobilisation ratios likely to greatly outperform current project averages. With the interactive calculator at the end of this blog, readers can model income differentials and climate finance mobilisation outcomes from circular migration programmes targeted towards different country and income-decile combinations. The results can be astounding.

Remittances’ benefits for climate-vulnerable populations

Vulnerability to climate shocks exists at the intersection of exposure, sensitivity, and low adaptive capacity. Vulnerable populations are exposed to shocks: they are in locations that will suffer floods, for example. They are sensitive to shocks: they are more likely to be affected, for example, because they are subsistence farmers reliant on good weather. And they have low adaptive capacity: they lack the resources to prepare for or quickly bounce back from a shock.

Remittances can reduce exposure if they allow a household to relocate (as in Senegal), but numerous studies show that their main contributions are in improving adaptive capacity and reducing sensitivity. Remittances allow households to maintain consumption where this would otherwisenot be possible (a key component of successful adaptation). They also allow households to pay off debts; to reconstruct accommodation after flooding, or pre-emptively prepare dwellings for shocks; to invest in agricultural inputs or diversify to off-farm activities; to fund healthcare and education; and to obtain technologies reducing vulnerability to shocks, such as communications devices, air conditioning, or solar panels and other forms of renewable energy.

Remittances also have benefits over climate finance explicitly intended to aid adaptation. They are financial transfers directly to households, under households’ control; climate finance, by contrast, often doesn’t reach the most local level. Remittances are thus analogous to cash or cash-for-work interventions, but at much larger amounts. They allow both anticipatory action ahead of shocks, and rapid response to shocks—often much more rapid than public adaptation responses. They would also be likely to have multiplier effects, benefiting the wider community in addition to recipient households.

Getting climate-vulnerable populations access to more remittances

Almost by definition, climate-vulnerable populations are poor. They are also likely to have limited access to opportunities more broadly, including education. Access to labour migration, which is expensive and typically has high prerequisites (such as education thresholds or language skills), is therefore challenging. People in lower-income countries typically struggle to access migration; residents preparing to migrate typically come from roughly the top third of the income distribution. In the Philippines, remittances sent in response to a typhoon flow predominantly to richer provinces with higher emigration, rather than to poorer provinces that may be more affected by the shock. This means that in relative terms, migration currently mostly helps those less likely to need help in the first place.

But there is one major channel through which climate-vulnerable populations could have access to labour migration: seasonal agricultural visas. They have few or no prerequisites, often not even language requirements. And the underlying model is relatively politically uncontroversial: seasonal visas are recognised to be economically necessary, and don’t result in long-term stays. Unlike other forms of immigration, seasonal schemes rarely feature in national political discussions.

Sitting on winning lottery tickets: Kenyan participation in the UK’s seasonal scheme

The UK Seasonal Worker visa programme had a cap in 2025 of 43,000 horticultural workers, with 2,000 more visas for the poultry sector. Workers are paid £12.21 (US$16) per hour, or £18.32 (US$24) per hour overtime. The visa is valid for six months, and a minimum working week of 32 hours is guaranteed, with overtime often available: workers will therefore earn at least £1,560 (US$2,100) per month. Living expenses are low, and accommodation costs are capped at around £10 (US$13) per day. Research by the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee suggests that workers would typically earn around £8,500 (US$11,300) after accounting for living expenses.

Of these earnings, a large proportion would be remitted. The exact proportion will vary, but research from other seasonal programmes suggests a likely range from 42 percent (as with New Zealand’s counterpart programme) to over 85 percent (as with Haitian participants in the US H-2A programme). This equates to £3,600 to £7,200 (US$4,800 to US$9,600).

Like many countries of destination, the UK is agnostic on where it recruits workers: workers are sourced from the countries most convenient for the seasonal scheme’s eight licensed recruiters. In 2024, nearly one-third (31 percent) of all visas went to workers from upper-middle or high-income countries (Figure 1). Nearly four-fifths of visas (78 percent) went to workers from Central Asian countries, replacing previous dominance by Russia and Ukraine. A relative exception is Kenya.

Kenya struggles to generate enough jobs for its large and growing youth population. In this context, the government has made a deliberate effort to find international jobs for its youth, including the flagship “Mkulima Majuu” (Farmer Abroad) programme. Under this initiative, Kenya established a partnership with HOPS Labour Solutions, one of the UK visa programme’s eight licensed recruiters.

Kenya assists HOPS in sourcing workers through the Youth Enterprise Development Fund, which also provides no-interest loans of up to Kshs 300,000 (US$2,300) to cover documentation and airfare costs. Kenya also provides workers with pre-departure training in 13 agricultural colleges. These courses, and the migration programme as a whole, have no prerequisites. The initiative has rapidly expanded from an initial pilot of 60 participants in 2023/24 to nearly 1,300 in 2024/25 (Figure 1).

The reason for Kenya’s drive is evident when we consider the income differential represented by the sums remitted. Let’s conservatively assume that a worker in the UK’s seasonal scheme remits US$5,000 (£3,800). For migrant workers coming from the 3^rd income decile in the UMICs and HICs currently providing 31 percent of the scheme’s workers, this sum would represent 121 percent of annual earnings—roughly doubling their incomes in the six-month period. But for a 3^rd-decile worker in Kenya, that sum would equate to an enormous 577 percent of annual income (Figure 2): the equivalent of nearly six years’ normal earnings in just six months.

For comparison, the average worker in the UK earns around £39,000 per year. To earn 577 percent of £39,000 post-tax in six months would be the equivalent of suddenly earning an annual pre-tax salary of over £800,000: a rapid rise to the top 0.1 percent of the earnings distribution. If a UK citizen played the EuroMillions lottery, the odds would be roughly 7 million to 1 against winning a similar amount. For low-decile workers in lower-income countries, these visas are the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket.

Governments’ incentive to act: Mobilising private climate finance

These remittance sums, huge relative to earning opportunities in potential countries of origin, could have enormous impacts on local adaptation outcomes. This is a great blessing in a landscape in which the adaptation needs of lower-income countries (estimated to reach at least US$310 billion by 2035) are not nearly met by adaptation finance flows that are actually falling.

This is in part because it has proven infamously challenging to mobilise private finance for adaptation. Contrary to early hopes and expectations, the average number of dollars of private finance mobilised by each dollar of public finance has never exceeded 0.42 in 2020; in 2023, it fell to 0.07 (Figure 3).

High-income governments have committed to providing larger amounts of adaptation finance. At COP30 in Brazil, the final text contained a call to at least triple adaptation finance (widely understood to mean an increase to US$120 billion by 2035). This will be challenging, and new sources of finance will need to be found. In 2023, UNEP suggested that remittances could be among the new sources of private finance to be mobilised for adaptation.

This so far hasn’t happened. In a detailed 2024 paper, we set out how this could be achieved in practice. This gets slightly more technical, but we summarise below. Under the OECD-DAC’s Rio marker guidance for the use and mobilisation of climate finance:

• Up to 100 percent of a project’s financing can be classified as climate finance if adaptation is a principal motivating aim (activities are fundamentally redesigned to support adaptation). In this case, the project has a ‘principal’ tag.
• A smaller proportion of a project’s financing, typically 30 – 50 percent, can be classified as climate finance if it aims to support adaptation but has ‘other prime objectives’. In this case the project has a ‘significant’ tag.

The proportion of private climate finance mobilised matches the proportion of project finance classifiable as climate finance (the “climate finance coefficient”). For example, a project tagged as “significant” with a 50 percent climate finance coefficient that mobilised US$1 million could count US$500,000 as “mobilised private climate finance.”

A migration programme’s main objective is to source workers for the country of destination. However, if the country of destination deliberately chose to recruit from climate-vulnerable populations in order to support adaptation, it would be eligible to use, and mobilise, climate finance. In this case, its goals would have changed to increase adaptation outcomes.

Operationalising this proposal would require the country of destination to recruit circular agricultural workers from climate-vulnerable populations in countries eligible to receive climate finance. These countries—"non-Annex I countries”—are shown in Figure 4.

Recruitment in those countries could be managed through partnerships with recruitment providers and government actors (as Kenya is proactively offering). In the case of Kenya, moreover, participants could be identified with data from the Hunger Safety Net Programme, a cash transfer programme that supports low-income populations affected by drought.

The cost of setting up a climate-targeted recruitment programme from scratch might be something in the region of US$1,300 per migrant (a figure from a Pacific pilot) or perhaps less, depending on the set-up. In Kenya, there is existing government-supported recruitment; the cost of helping it towards climate-vulnerable populations would surely be much less. But if we compare the US$1,300 figure with the US$5,000 we conservatively suggested might be remitted, deduct US$1,000 in migrant participation costs, and apply a 50 percent climate finance coefficient, we end up with US$1,300 public facilitation finance to US$2,000 in mobilised adaptation finance: a ratio of over 1:1.5. This is a strong leverage ratio for an adaptation project.

What to do next

Many countries of destination are unthinkingly sitting on winning lottery tickets. They should give those lottery tickets to those who most need them. Allocating circular labour migration visas to lower-income, climate-vulnerable populations could have an enormous impact by delivering life-changing amounts of money directly to households, boosting resilience to climate shocks.

Getting more circular labour visas to lower-income populations is achievable, as evidenced by the rapid growth of Kenyan participation in the UK’s circular agricultural scheme. This would not be politically challenging; circular programmes already exist and are relatively uncontroversial. Retooling existing initiatives for adaptation could mobilise scarce finance at strong leverage ratios: it is a low-effort win-win.

Below, we provide an interactive calculator that allows readers to input values relevant to their own context and see what the resulting remittances mean for different populations. This is wonkish, but give it a go: the results are often astounding. (For still more detail, go to the full formula in the paper.) Next steps should include feasibility assessments by countries either operating a seasonal worker scheme or seeking to establish one, on the way to setting up targeted recruitment programmes. We live in a landscape of constrained resources and proliferating shocks. Winning lottery tickets cannot be left unused.