The Central Hills of Nepal are a complex agro-environmental system where people traditionally cultivated their rural livelihoods within a relatively isolated subsistence system. This encouraged an intimate relationship between smallholder farmers and the surrounding environment. In the present day, Nepali smallholders can choose to balance a separate livelihood as a labor migrant in the greater world, navigating the global labor market for additional financial gain. By working abroad, Nepali labor migrants are able to provide additional financial security to their families back home. Labor migrants in this system are pushed and pulled between the isolated villages of Central Nepal and the greater world outside, tethered to and influencing both. Recently, a changing climate has been exacerbating existing factors such as natural disaster, environmental degradation, and economic hardship, creating the potential for more smallholder households to engage in labor migration, which then creates the potential for further change to the existing relationships between people and nature. Rural livelihoods, labor migration, the climate, and environmental systems of Nepal's Central Hills have often been studied separately. Researchers have occasionally examined the relationship between one or two of these components, preferring to focus more narrowly on specific elements of these relationships. This paper holistically investigates the bonds between livelihood strategies, the changing climate and environment, and labor migration within the framing of social-ecological systems thinking in the Central Hills of Nepal.