This paper explores the growing interface between climate displacement and participation in `global care chains’ under conditions in which climate change is already impacting on lives and livelihoods – especially in the Global South. Early engagements with ‘climate migration’ tended towards alarmist predictions of mass migration, triggering proposals to `secure’ potential host nations against anticipated influxes. Recently, apparently more sober and measured approaches have emerged in which labour migration is viewed as contributing positively to climate `resilience’. We evaluate this policy turn in the light of everyday ‘ground level’ caring practices and adaptive responses to climate stress. The new approach, we argue, encourages more able and resourceful people from under-resourced, climate-vulnerable regions to join trans-local or transnational labour markets – which often equates with predominantly female care workers entering global care chains. Effectively, this means that those best equipped to provide care in places where it is most urgently needed end up providing care in relatively privileged, less climate-vulnerable places. Questioning the climate justice implications of this mobilization against the gradient of vulnerability, we offer suggestions about how climate policy could actually support caring practices in the places where ordinary people struggle at the sharp edge of global climate change.