2025 Grimes Fellow Examines the Intersection of Climate Change and Migration

Master of Human Rights student (MHR ’26) Hank Hellstrom didn’t always know he wanted to study human rights. “I went to school for mechanical engineering, a different path than the one I ended up taking, although I was interested in climate change at the time,” he explains. “When I finished my undergraduate degree, I changed how I thought about the world and what I thought about engineering. I realized I wanted to work on a more systemic level than I thought I could before.” The pivot was the start of a journey from working in emergency shelters, to building capacity for programs supporting immigrants and refugees, to joining the MHR program. This year, Hellstrom received the Sharon Grimes Human Rights Fellowship, an award that grants $1,000 to a Master of Human Rights student with a commitment to human rights and the environment. 

Hellstrom first became interested in climate change and environmental justice as an undergraduate student. “Climate change was on my mind when I went to the Georgia Institute of Technology for engineering,” he says. “I took classes related to climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice while I was there.” Through his coursework, he realized that the challenges surrounding climate change were not simply a question of technology and science, but primarily a matter of politics. After graduating from Georgia Tech, Hellstrom decided to step back from engineering and reexamine his career trajectory. Wanting to create an impact on an individual level, he worked in emergency shelters for two years as he considered his future career prospects and contemplated how he might best serve others. 

This experience working in emergency shelters proved to be invaluable, as it solidified the connection between human rights and Hellstrom’s interest in the environment. One of the devastating effects of climate change includes environmental displacement and an increase in climate refugees, which can quickly spiral into a humanitarian disaster. While most environmental displacement is internal, for those who do cross borders climate-induced migration does not currently grant refugee status or legal protection. However, as environmental disasters and slow-onset changes like drought and desertification increasingly drive mass migration, debate over enshrining climate refugees as a protected class under international law has only intensified. Hellstrom’s time working in emergency shelters highlighted the hardships that displaced and unhoused individuals face. “Working in shelters enhanced my understanding of how traumatizing displacement can be,” he says. “I was able to witness the negative feedback of poverty firsthand—how hard it is to get out of the situation of being unhoused and how many systemic factors work against people.” Although his job was not directly connected to climate change, witnessing the difficulties of displacement and homelessness deepened Hellstrom’s motivation to return to his interest in environmental action and human rights.

Later, Hellstrom worked at the International Institute of Minnesota, an organization dedicated to assisting refugees and immigrants integrate into their new communities. He decided to pursue the Master of Human Rights degree to better understand how to implement policy-level changes. His work experiences in emergency shelters and at the International Institute of Minnesota fueled his desire to study human rights. “These experiences provide me with real context when I’m studying and thinking about human rights and the changes I can make,” he affirms. 

To Hellstrom, supporting human rights in the context of climate change includes helping communities to adapt their livelihoods to climate realities, improving infrastructure to weather natural hazards, advocating for the rights of the displaced, and crafting effective policies to support climate refugees. It also means pursuing legal remedies to attempt to repair damages impacting the most vulnerable communities. Environmental justice is essential, he notes, as the most vulnerable communities are historically the least responsible for climate change. Last semester, Hellstrom created a poster presentation and wrote a paper on the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, the international fund created to address the environmental loss and damage experienced by developing countries at the hands of historical polluters. 

“The environment plays a very direct role in human rights,” Hellstrom emphasizes. “Think about rights to clean water, food, and health. This is directly related to the environment you are in.” Hellstrom is attentive to the variety of ways that human rights interact with the environment- spanning issues such as environmental justice, land defense, indigenous rights, and public health. But the aspect he is focused on is human rights advocacy in relation to climate change. The all-encompassing nature of climate change means that all members of the world share a stake in advancing solutions—which presents the Herculean task of coordinating diverse actors, organizations, and nations with competing economic interests and political visions. Hellstrom understands the challenges. “The main difficulty of climate advocacy is how to get people to care about other people across the world who they will probably never see and who are different from them,” he acknowledges, adding that while this is a huge challenge, it is also one that people have contended with in other contexts historically.

This is where the Sharon Grimes Human Rights Fellowship comes in. “I’m on this path to learn the skills that I need to professionally advocate for human rights and the environment in the context of climate change,” says Hellstrom. “The fellowship supports me and makes it easier to conduct advocacy work. I’m very grateful for that.” With support from the Grimes Fellowship, Hellstrom aims to continue exploring measures that can help people better adapt to climate change. As the Grimes Fellowship emphasizes, the environment is far more valuable to humanity than the resources we extract from it. Thus, investment in the environment is an investment in human rights. Imminent action must be taken to protect the earth because at the end of the day, Hellstrom notes, the environment may be easy to mine, extract, and destroy—but it is not so easily replaced.