Climate Change Is Quietly Reshaping Global Migration Patterns

When nearly 80,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in July 2026, and at least 141 died in the attempt, the crossing was widely described as a migration crisis. But researchers who study the region say the drivers behind it cannot be separated from years of environmental stress — a seven-year drought that only recently broke, followed by flash floods and landslides in the High Atlas Mountains, extreme heat and wildfires in the north and southeast, and depleted groundwater that has undermined farming, according to reporting by Mother Jones.

"Mood music," not a single trigger

Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist who studies climate and conflict, told Mother Jones that climate change acts like "mood music" behind migration — it rarely causes someone to leave on its own, but it "puts a proverbial thumb on the scales that amplifies the pressure exerted by a whole bundle of other things," such as poverty, weak governance or lack of jobs.

Petra Molnar, a lawyer and researcher on migration, put it more bluntly: "Every story of human movement now is a climate story... Pretty much every case of forced or 'voluntary' migration has a climate element built into it." Migration researcher Karolina Sobczak-Szelc added that the pattern is usually gradual, moving "from village to small town, from small town to bigger city" before any cross-border journey is even considered.

A January 2026 Afrobarometer survey found that nearly one-fifth of Moroccans questioned said they had considered relocating because of climate impacts, according to Mother Jones.

What the numbers show

The most-cited projection comes from the World Bank's Groundswell report, first published in 2018 and updated in 2021. It estimates that 216 million people across six regions could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 because of slow-onset climate impacts such as water scarcity, falling crop yields and sea-level rise. Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to account for the largest share, at 86 million internal migrants, followed by East Asia and the Pacific (49 million), South Asia (40 million), North Africa (19 million), Latin America (17 million) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (5 million).

A separate 2021 World Bank estimate cited by Mother Jones projects 1.9 million internal climate migrants within Morocco alone by 2050. The World Bank states that early emissions cuts combined with inclusive, resilient development could reduce the scale of internal climate migration by as much as 80 percent.

Displacement linked to sudden disasters is already climbing. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's 2025 Global Report on Internal Displacement, disasters triggered 45.8 million internal displacements in 2024 — the highest figure since the organization began tracking disaster displacement in 2008, and nearly double the previous decade's annual average. Separately, conflict triggered more than 20 million displacements in 2024, almost half of them linked to Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The report put the global number of people living in internal displacement at a record 83.4 million at the end of 2024, a figure also confirmed by the UN News and the International Organization for Migration.

Who is hit hardest

Several researchers argue that climate-linked displacement does not affect all populations equally. A piece in Honi Soit, the University of Sydney student newspaper, cites the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's figure of 2.7 million people displaced in Kenya between 2008 and 2024, and the case of Susan Akal, a Kenyan woman who walked nearly 250 kilometers in search of food, water and safety during a 2022 drought that the article says raised acute food insecurity by 80 percent in the region.

The same article argues that gender inequality compounds climate pressure: women and girls in many affected regions face structural barriers to education and paid work, and those who do not migrate often absorb additional unpaid domestic labor, such as walking longer distances for water, as seen among Indigenous women in eastern Bolivia during droughts.

The piece also references the concept of "solastalgia," coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, to describe distress experienced by people who remain in a home environment that has become unrecognizable due to ecological change — a form of homesickness without leaving home.

A policy and legal gap

International law currently has no formal legal category for "climate migrants" or "climate refugees," which researchers say makes the phenomenon harder to measure, track and respond to systematically, according to Mother Jones' reporting.

That gap is part of why researchers and institutions are pushing to connect academic findings with policymaking. UNU-MERIT, part of the United Nations University, is holding an online masterclass on November 5, 2026, on migration and climate change, where researchers Melissa Siegel, Robert Oakes and Bushra Ebadi are expected to address common misconceptions, climate-mobility modeling for policymakers, and how digital infrastructure such as data centers and border checkpoints affects displaced communities, according to the event description published by UNU.