ABSTRACT
This chapter examines statistics on migration, environment and climate change. The subject of migration and climate change has received a great deal of academic, media and policy attention in recent years, with figures suggesting that hundreds of millions of people could be forced to migrate due to climate change frequently appearing in the media. Policy interest in the subject has been driven by the perception that large numbers of people will be displaced. Extreme environmental events such as cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and tornadoes tend to capture media headlines, but gradual changes in the environment may actually have a greater impact on the movement of people in the future. For example, during the period from 1979 to 2008, 718 million people were affected by storms compared with 1.6 billion people affected by droughts.
