Conference Agenda

Current climate migration literature focuses on establishing links between climate drivers and migration. However, it often overlooks the broader role migration plays within the context of climate impacts, adaptation, and the connection with mitigation. This article highlights four key research gaps: (1) the effectiveness of migration as an adaptation strategy, (2) how migration interacts with in-situ adaptation efforts, (3) migration’s impacts on origin and destination communities, and (4) feedback between climate mitigation policies and migration. To address these gaps, we propose solutions grounded in strengthening conceptual frameworks, expanded and harmonized data, and advancing methodological innovation. Together, these efforts can inform policymaking to better protect vulnerable populations, allocate resources more effectively, and strengthen resilience and justice.

This paper develops a dynamic quantitative spatial general equilibrium model with age-specific agents and multiple locations to study the impact of climate change on mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. The model integrates adaptation to economic and health-related issues of climate change through trade and migration, and assesses the effectiveness of adaptation policies to mitigate climate-change-induced mortality. The model is calibrated using a rich set of data from household surveys, satellite data, and the epidemiological literature on a fine grid at 1\textdegree{} resolution, and projects the economy and demography into future climate scenarios. By 2050, 350,000 additional deaths could be attributable to climate change, particularly due to the increase in undernutrition and the expansion of malaria-suitable zones. A counterfactual scenario suggests that reducing country barriers to migration could significantly reduce climate-induced mortality from undernutrition.

This paper proposes a novel empirical approach to estimating the economic cost of climate change by examining how migrants trade off a change in their long-run climate against real income. Migration events often involve a shift in climate comparable in magnitude to warming projections over the 21st century. Assuming that migrants know how these climatic differences affect their economic and social wellbeing, we combine U.S. Census data on individual migration decisions, labor market outcomes, housing costs, and demographic characteristics into a discrete choice framework to assess how potential earnings and climate jointly influence relocation decisions within the United States. We use these estimates to infer a willingness-to-accept value for climate change, demonstrating robustness to myriad modeling approaches. We then combine this valuation estimate with a global simple climate model and probabilistic future projections of emissions and socioeconomic change to convert this value into a social cost of carbon (SCC) for the U.S., contributing a new method for SCC estimation to a growing body of research aiming to quantify the costs of a warming world.

Migration is widely recognized as a key mechanism for adapting to climate change. However, in many developing countries, liquidity constraints limit households’ ability to migrate in response to climate shocks, resulting in spatial misallocations of labor that hinder economic development. This paper quantifies the economic costs of these misallocations. Using reduced-form estimations, we start by documenting heterogeneity in migration response to drought according to the income level, which is consistent with the liquidity constraint hypothesis. Then, we develop a quantitative spatial model of migration and trade by combining satellite and census data. We find that, by 2080, 31 million potential migrants will be trapped by climate change and that this leads to substantial welfare losses across African economies. Our results further highlight how liquidity constraints amplify the spatial heterogeneity in the impacts of climate change across and within countries of the region.