Impact of Climate Change on Migration: The Rise of Climate Refugees

Overview: how climate pressure becomes migration pressure

Climate change does not create a single migration pathway. It intensifies or reshapes hazards such as extreme rainfall, tropical cyclones, floods, heat stress, drought and wildfire risk. These hazards interact with housing quality, poverty, land rights, social protection, infrastructure, early-warning systems, insurance coverage and evacuation capacity.

Most disaster-related movement is internal. People may move from a flooded village to a nearby town, from a coastal district to an inland city, from an unsafe home to a shelter, or from damaged housing to relatives. Some movements last days, while others become prolonged when homes, farmland, roads, schools or jobs cannot be restored quickly.

This is why disaster displacement is useful for climate migration research. It captures the immediate mobility shock created by disasters, including pre-emptive evacuations, repeated movement and cases where people leave before a hazard reaches them.

Why this ranking does not count “climate refugees” directly

The phrase “climate refugees” is common in public debate, but it is not a separate legal status under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Refugee law is based on specific protection grounds such as persecution, not on climate change alone. For that reason, there is no official international dataset that ranks countries by climate refugees.

Disaster displacement is not a perfect substitute, but it is measurable, comparable and updated by IDMC across countries. It gives a grounded way to examine where disasters produced the largest forced movement in 2024, while avoiding the misleading impression that every person in the table has a formal refugee status.

Why countries differ in disaster displacement numbers

Top 10 countries by disaster displacements in 2024

The top ten are dominated by countries exposed to major storms, floods and evacuation events. The United States and the Philippines are far ahead of the rest of the ranking, while India, China and Bangladesh show the scale of monsoon, cyclone and flood-related mobility in Asia.

Top 10 disaster displacement figures, 2024

Ranking is calculated from the underlying movement count in descending order. Values are displayed in millions for readability.

Methodology

The metric is internal displacements associated with disasters in 2024. It counts movements, not unique people. A person may be counted more than once if forced to move multiple times during the year. The ranking is sorted from highest to lowest value.

Formula used for display: source value divided by 1,000,000 equals the M label; source value divided by 1,000 equals the K label. The Top 20 total in this table is 42.269 million movements, and the Top 5 account for 31.756 million movements, or 75.1% of that Top 20 total.

Disaster displacement includes movement associated with sudden-onset natural hazards. Many events are weather-related, such as storms and floods, but the metric should not be read as a pure climate-attribution measure. It does not prove that every movement was caused by anthropogenic climate change.

The ranking does not measure planned relocation, permanent migration, climate vulnerability, deaths, economic loss, housing destruction, evacuation quality, duration of displacement or whether people were able to return home safely.

Main ranking: Top 20 countries by disaster displacements

Use the controls to search by country, filter by region, change the sort order or switch between Top 10, Top 20 and all entries.

Top 20 countries by internal displacements associated with disasters, 2024

Data source: IDMC Global Internal Displacement Database and GRID 2025 report material for 2024 disaster-related internal displacement movements. Accessed July 8, 2026.

Insights from the disaster displacement ranking

What this means for climate migration

The rise of climate-related displacement is not only about people moving permanently across borders. The first and most common movement is often local or national: evacuation from a coastal area, flight from a flooded settlement, movement from a damaged home to relatives, or relocation to temporary accommodation.

A high disaster figure does not automatically mean a country has the most “climate refugees”. It means that disasters forced many movements inside that country during the year. Some of those movements may be short evacuations; others may become prolonged when homes, infrastructure, crops or jobs are destroyed.

The ranking also shows why climate mobility policy cannot be separated from housing, infrastructure, water management, social protection and disaster preparedness. A storm or flood becomes a displacement crisis when people cannot stay safely, cannot return quickly, or cannot rebuild without losing their livelihood.

The safest reading is to treat these figures as a pressure signal. They show where disasters produced the largest mobility shocks in 2024, while the longer-term migration outcome depends on recovery, insurance, public support, land access, labour markets and whether future hazards keep repeating.

FAQ

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