Context: As per a new study Human migration due to changing climate happens primarily in middle income and agricultural-dependent countries.
Key highlights of the study

• The impacts of climate change that caused migration of people were mainly changes in temperature, rainfall variability and rapid onset events like storms, cyclones and floods.
• Environmental factors can drive migration, but the size of the effects depends on the particular economic and sociopolitical conditions in the countries.
• In both, low and high income countries, environmental impacts on migration are weaker.
• It is because people are either too poor to leave and therefore essentially become trapped, or in wealthy countries, they have enough financial means to absorb the consequences.
• It is mainly in middle-income regions and those with a dependency on agriculture that we see strong effects.

High risk zones

• It found that the strongest relationship between migration and climate-related environmental hazards was found in countries from Latin America, the Caribbean, sub Saharan Africa, west, south and south east Asia
• These populations are also most at risk from climate change disasters such tropical cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, extreme rainfall and floods.