Climate Change and Human Mobility: Considering Context, Mechanisms, and Selectivity

Climate change is projected to increase human mobility. Research links climate stressors, such as warming temperatures, severe weather events, and rising sea levels, to human migration within and between countries in many regions of the world. This paper reviews this new frontier for migration research and charts directions for future work. Understanding climate mobility, we argue, requires considering local context to identify mechanisms (what climate impacts) and selectivity (who responds). Research needs to draw more on existing theory to deduce selectivity patterns under alternative drivers of mobility and to extend the theory by considering how those patterns shift under climate shocks. Research also needs to generalize from diverse findings by documenting which mechanisms and selectivity patterns are most common in which contexts.