Climate change, natural disasters, and migration-a survey of the empirical evidence

Abstract

Climate-induced migration is one of the most hotly debated topics in the current discourse on global warming and its consequences. There is a burgeoning field in economics and other social sciences linking climatic factors or climate-related natural disasters to migration. Existent empirical studies use different measures to quantify migration flows and climatic factors and apply a variety of methodologies to disparate data sets and samples of countries. Our review article aims to provide a unifying perspective over this complex field by structuring the literature and summarizing the empirical findings.