Recent climate disasters serve as a reminder of the growing—yet overlooked—risk of climate-induced displacement in the Global North. This paper contributes to a nascent literature on climate migration in high-income countries by extending the evidence to a new context: Australia. Applying propensity score matching to panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we conduct the first causal assessment of the direct short-term impact of extreme weather events on internal migration in Australia.

Our findings suggest that, from 2009 to 2022, an annual average of 1.6% of Australians aged 15+ (or ~308,000 people a year) experienced housing damage caused by floods, cyclones or bushfire. Such damage increases the probability of changing address within one year by 7.3%, displacing an annual average of 22,261 Australians. Cumulatively, this amounts to ~312,000 people displaced by climate-induced housing damage between 2009 and 2022. Importantly, this type of climate-induced migration is not evenly spread across the population. Contrary to findings from the Global South, we find no evidence of “entrapment effects”, except for uninsured homeowners. Instead, our results indicate that over 80% of climate-displaced Australians come from the bottom two income quartiles, with the poorest 3% accounting for 14% of the displaced population.

The most disadvantaged Australians thus face a double vulnerability: they are both more likely to sustain housing damage from extreme weather events and more likely to be displaced, net of the effect of differences in socio-demographic attributes. These findings bear important implications for adaptation strategies and policy responses to natural disasters and for future research on climate-induced migration.

Aude Bernard is a demographer at the Queensland Centre for Population Research in the School of the Environment at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on understanding internal migration processes and their consequences for individuals, regions and nations through comparative analysis. She has developed measurement and estimation techniques for the international comparison of migration levels, patterns and selectivity.

Aude's current projects include:
(1) internal migration and the regional retention of immigrants,
(2) internal migration forecasting,
(3) the long-term consequences of childhood migration and
(4) the impact of climate change on migration within and to Australia.
 

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