Understanding the impact of climate change on human migration is critical for policymakers, but it can both incentivize people to migrate and reduce their ability to move, making its effect ambiguous.
Following this evidence, the authors propose an approach to studying migration that combines causal inference methods with cross-validation techniques to reliably estimate effects of weather on migration within and across borders, an approach that highlights the key role of migrant demographics in the weather-migration relationship.
They show that allowing climate effects to vary by age and education improves predictive performance more than fivefold compared with assuming uniform effects. This demographic heterogeneity explains much of the variation in migration responses.
Their projections suggest that climate change will have much larger effects on future cross-border migration for most demographic groups than the average effect indicates. However, differing responses across groups tend to offset one another, shaping the overall migration outcome.
Learn more about this paper here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62969-3
Reference
Benveniste, H., Huybers, P. & Proctor, J. Global climate migration is a story of who and not just how many. Nat Commun 16, 7752 (2025)