World’s human migration patterns in 2000–2019 unveiled by high-resolution data

Abstract

Despite being a topical issue in public debate and on the political agenda for many countries, a global-scale, high-resolution quantification of migration and its major drivers for the recent decades remained missing. We created a global dataset of annual net migration between 2000 and 2019 (~10 km grid, covering the areas of 216 countries or sovereign states), based on reported and downscaled subnational birth (2,555 administrative units) and death (2,067 administrative units) rates. We show that, globally, around 50% of the world’s urban population lived in areas where migration accelerated urban population growth, while a third of the global population lived in provinces where rural areas experienced positive net migration. Finally, we show that, globally, socioeconomic factors are more strongly associated with migration patterns than climatic factors. While our method is dependent on census data, incurring notable uncertainties in regions where census data coverage or quality is low, we were able to capture migration patterns not only between but also within countries, as well as by socioeconomic and geophysical zonings. Our results highlight the importance of subnational analysis of migration—a necessity for policy design, international cooperation and shared responsibility for managing internal and international migration.

Cropland abandonment in the context of drought, economic restructuring, and migration in northeast Syria

“…In the case of Syria, the lack of reliable migration data has been a restraining factor in better understanding the linkages between drought, migration and the 2011 civil war [27]. While approaches to model population and migration patterns exist [49][50][51][52][53], many datasets have a global focus and sometimes reservations for regions where e.g. census data is limited, such as the Middle East.…”

Downscaled gridded global dataset for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita PPP over 1990-2022

“…This, in turn, might lead to high inaccuracies in the results. Over the past decade, an increasing number of subnational or gridded datasets for various socioeconomic variables have been published, including data on migration patterns 4 , urbanization 5 , and the human development index (HDI) 6,7 .…”

“…Once the subnational data were collected, we calculated the population weighted national average GDP per capita values for each country and reported year. For population data, we used a combination of WorldPop 25 and HYDE 26 data; for more information, see Niva et al 4 . The derived Admin 0 level GDP per capita data were then used to calculate the ratio between the Admin 1 level and Admin 0 level GDP per capita values (adm1/adm0).…”

“…For the population data we used the delta change method with a population count of 2000 to match the HYDE data with the WorldPop data. For this purpose, we rst resampled the WorldPop data to 5 arc-min resolution and then harmonized it with national-level population data (see more in Niva et al 4 ).…”

Environmental health, economy, and amenities interactively drive migration patterns among China's older people

“…Due to inconsistent preferences and composition of the population, research studies on the influencing factors have produced inconsistent and even contradictory results. The regional economy has always played an important role in population migration ( 9 , 10 ). If the migration benefit is larger than the migration cost, it will promote migration, for instance, a higher annual net immigration rate is related to the GDP and disposable income ( 11 , 12 ).…”