Becoming a Climate Migrant: Climate Change and Sequential Migration Decision-Making
Abstract
Abstract When and how does someone living through climate crisis decide to migrate? This article theorizes climate migration using an ethnographic case from northeastern Colombia during protracted drought. Results reveal that a household’s decision to move in response to climate hazards is not a single event–but rather one in a sequence of decisions to stay or go. This analysis demonstrates that the number of decisions a family has made to stay impacts the likelihood of migration, changes the severity of the climate impacts required to motivate a move, and results in different migrant categories. These decisions are shaped by the material and social resources available to households and their subjective experiences of time during climate stress. Decisions to stay or go occur repeatedly over varying timescales, each one carrying consequences for future migration, mobility, and immobility outcomes. This research ethnographically identifies two categories of climate migrants resulting from sequential climate migration decisions: adaptive migrants and distress migrants. It also reveals individual strategic migrants as a strategy for household-level immobility. These findings suggest modeling climate migration with a sequential approach and multiple categories of climate migrants.
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Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-000-3783083 |