This report uses rich glob­al sur­vey data from the Gallup World Poll to analyse the rela­tion­ship between envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions, dis­place­ment and migra­tion. An instru­men­tal vari­able mod­el is used to link geocod­ed data on envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters to indi­vid­ual antic­i­pa­tion of dis­place­ment and migra­tion aspi­ra­tions. The report con­firms the estab­lished find­ing that the con­nec­tions between envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors and human mobil­i­ty pat­terns at var­i­ous spa­tial scales are com­plex and con­text spe­cif­ic. In par­tic­u­lar, the report sug­gests that in less-devel­oped regions an expec­ta­tion of high­er risks of future envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters leads to a low­er indi­vid­ual desire to migrate internationally.

By con­trast, in least-devel­oped regions the antic­i­pa­tion of high­er risks of envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters induces those indi­vid­u­als who wish to migrate inter­na­tion­al­ly to increase their efforts to plan for inter­na­tion­al migra­tion. These results point to causal rela­tion­ships between envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors and migra­tion behav­iour in coun­tries with low­er lev­els of devel­op­ment. They add fur­ther nuanced find­ings to dis­cus­sions on cli­mate change expo­sure, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and ‘envi­ron­men­tal immo­bil­i­ty’ and on cli­mate-induced migra­tion and dis­place­ment of dif­fer­ent types and at var­i­ous spa­tial scales.