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Climate change has been widely portrayed as dramatically reshaping the global migration landscape by altering the habitability and attractiveness of different locales. Much of the empirical evidence on the relationship between climate and migration has focused on the impacts of episodic events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, or droughts. However, the impacts of permanent, slow-onset changes such as sea level rise have been largely overlooked. This gap is especially concerning as sea level rise is projected to affect as many as 13M people in the United States alone by the end of the century.

Here, we integrate high-resolution address history data on 12M individuals in North Carolina to evaluate how exposure to sea level rise and hurricanes influence residential migration choices. Using a combination of survival analysis and linear probability models, preliminary results suggest that the duration of residence in the areas most exposed to sea level rise has decreased in recent years, consistent with a recent acceleration in coastal flood frequency. Exposure to hurricanes alone also increases the likelihood of moving. However, post-hurricane out-migration is lower in the areas most exposed to sea level rise than in areas unaffected by sea level rise. In all, our results provide new empirical evidence that sea level rise is beginning to affect migration in the lowest-lying coastal zones, but the slow-onset impacts may differ than those from extreme storms.