Trapped at home: Climate stress is more likely to immobilise the poor than to move them
Climate-driven displacement is widely expected to push millions across international borders. Drawing on monthly bilateral flows for 127 developing-country origins, this column finds the reverse: a temperature shock reduces emigration rather than raising it, because climate stress cuts origin incomes and poor households cannot finance a costly international move.
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Why would heat keep people at home? Moving across a border is expensive. It takes visa fees, travel, recruitment costs, and increasingly the financial reserves that richer-country immigration regimes demand up front. A household that loses income cannot simply substitute towards a costly international move; it may lose the means to finance one at all.
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These findings bear directly on how climate displacement is projected. A common forecasting shortcut multiplies a global population at climate risk by a positive emigration elasticity. For the poor, hot origin countries where the constraint binds, that calculation has the wrong sign, and hence overstates near-term cross-border displacement.
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