Led by ND-GAIN collaborators from the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, this paper considers the relationship between migration and climate-change risk. Published in the Journal of Sustainability, “Climate Vulnerability and Human Migration in Global Perspective” is the first global-scale analysis of the association between migration and people’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. Climate vulnerability increases with people’s inability to cope with extreme weather events, which can affect infrastructure and the availability of ecosystem services, creating socioeconomic and geopolitical pressures. These factors, in turn, can influence people’s mobility.

Using an the ND-GAIN Country Index,  an established index of climate vulnerability, the authors found that people, on average, move from countries of higher vulnerability to less vulnerable ones, reducing global climate-change risk by 15 percent between 1990 and 2010