Environmental Hazards as Disamenities: Selective Migration and Income Change in the United States from 2000-2010

Abstract

An emerging area of migration research is the complex relationship between migration and environmental hazards, broadly defined. Environmental hazards are best viewed through a vulnerability lens, which has two components. The first is exposure - the frequency and duration of the hazardous events-and the second is adaptive capacity - the ability of communities to mitigate, deflect, or absorb the effects of exposure. Because migration is selective of individuals and places, it changes both the population's size and composition, thus affecting its exposure and adaptive capacity. In this article we examine how migration varies among sets of counties that experience significantly different exposures to all environmental hazards in the United States. We create an environmental hazards impact index in an attempt to measure the impacts of environmental hazards at the county level over a period of years. We found that counties that experience the greatest impacts from environmental hazards are losing income as a result of the migration. In counties with the highest impacts, income is lost through both net outmigration as well as income loss through out-migrants having higher incomes than in-migrants.