Dislocation climb plays an important role in understanding plastic deformation of metallic materials at high temperature. In this paper, we present a continuum formulation for dislocation climb velocity based on densities of dislocations. The obtained continuum formulation is an accurate approximation of the Green’s function-based discrete dislocation dynamics method (Gu et al., 2015). The continuum dislocation climb formulation has the advantage of accounting for both the long-range effect of vacancy bulk diffusion and that of the Peach–Koehler climb force, and the two long-range effects are canceled into a short-range effect (integral with fast-decaying kernel) and in some special cases, a completely local effect. This significantly simplifies the calculation in the Green’s function-based discrete dislocation dynamics method, in which a linear system has to be solved over the entire system for the long-range effect of vacancy diffusion and the long-range Peach–Koehler climb force has to be calculated. This obtained continuum dislocation climb velocity can be applied in any available continuum dislocation dynamics frameworks. We also present numerical validations for this continuum climb velocity and simulation examples for implementation in continuum dislocation dynamics frameworks.