Migration patterns under different scenarios of sea level rise

Abstract: We propose a framework to examine future migration patterns of people under different sea level rise scenarios using models of human migration. Specifically, we couple a sea level rise model with a data-driven model of human migration, creating a generalized joint model of climate driven migration that can be used to simulate population distributions under potential future sea level rise scenarios. We show how this joint model relaxes assumptions in existing efforts to model climate driven human migration, and use it to simulate how migration, driven by sea level rise, differs from baseline migration patterns. Our results show that the effects of sea level rise are pervasive, expanding beyond coastal areas via increased migration, and disproportionately affecting some areas of the United States. The code for reproducing this study is available at https://github.com/calebrob6/migration-slr.