Analysis of Impacts of Environmental and Natural Hazards on Human Migration

Climate-related hazards are expected to permanently or temporarily displace millions of people around the world in the coming decades. In the US, coastal cities face the twin threats of sea-level rise and more intense tropical storms, with extreme precipitation contributing to more flood events, while Western states are primed by climate-related warming and drying for increased wildfire activity.

Federal, state, and local governments have invested in hazard mitigation and adaptation to reinforce settlements against these environmental hazards, but increasingly scientists and policy actors are acknowledging that climate migration is inevitable. A coupled human and environmental understanding of the hazard-migration relationship anchored in the social sciences is critical for policy development around post-disaster rebuilding, population relocation, and managed retreat.

The project creates a new dataset called the Dataset on Environment-Migration Systems (DEMS) to investigate the effects of highly destructive climate-related hazards such as tropical cyclones, floods, and wildfires on migration behavior for the US population as well as for population subgroups defined by age, sex, race, ethnicity, and nativity during the past 20-years. These hazards differ in their spatial and temporal scales, frequency, and the mechanisms by which they affect communities and provide contrasts to support investigations that build a broad understanding of hazard-driven human migration and why some demographic groups may be more prone to climate migration.

To achieve the overarching project goal of understanding the effects of climate-related hazards on migration behavior, the work is structured around three core objectives: 1) construction of a new spatiotemporal dataset to support analyses of environmental hazards and internal US migration; 2) investigation of relationships between environmental hazards and the redistribution of the population as a whole and by sociodemographic sub-groups; and 3) support of public use of the DEMS.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.