While the effects of climatic changes on migration have received widespread public and scientific attention, comparative evidence for their influence on internal migration worldwide remains scarce. Here we use census-based data from 72 countries (1960–2016) to analyse 107,840 migration flows between subnational regions. We find that increased drought and aridity have a significant impact on internal migration, particularly in the hyper-arid and arid areas of Southern Europe, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and South America. Migration patterns are shaped by the wealth, agricultural dependency and urbanization of both origin and destination areas with migration responses being stronger in rural and predominantly agricultural areas. While overall climatic effects on migration are stronger in richer countries, we observe higher out-migration from poorer towards wealthier regions within countries. Furthermore, age and education groups respond differently to climatic stress, highligh This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access options Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription $29.99 / 30 days cancel any time Receive 12 print issues and online access $209.00 per year only $17.42 per issue Buy this article Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout Data availability The replication data used to generate and visualize the results reported in this study are available in a Harvard Dataverse repository77. The data analysis was carried out in R. Code availability The code used to generate and visualize the results reported in this study and the details of the R packages used in the data analysis are available in a Harvard Dataverse repository77. References Burrell, A. L., Evans, J. P. & de Kauwe, M. G. Anthropogenic climate change has... |