Sea Level Rise-Driven Migration

As the planet warms, a diverse range of climate-driven hazards will drastically alter patterns of human migration. Because of a lack of historical observations, potential migration responses to sea level rise are particularly challenging to project. This project, co-led by Katharine Ricke, an assistant professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego who holds a joint appointment with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Gaurav Khanna, an assistant professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, will analyze sea level rise -motivated human migration at a global scale using a modular framework to quantify and assess uncertainty associated with population change, climate and environmental change and models of internal displacement and international migration. The analysis will characterize, partition and—when feasible—quantify uncertainties before exploring international migration pressures and flows under diverse models of the institutions that will constrain immigration, in particular understanding the implications for outcomes when sea level rise-driven migration is operationalized as involuntary displacement versus organized relocation.