A disaster risk and resilience analysis framework provides insights for modelling natural hazard-induced human mobility
In the face of a changing climate, natural hazards are playing a growing role in shaping human mobility, either propelling or restricting the movement of people across space and time. Existing approaches to modelling natural hazard-induced human mobility often rely on oversimplified assumptions, for instance, accounting exclusively for mobility drivers related to the built environment or market dynamics. Here, we present a modelling framework built on a more comprehensive understanding of how natural hazards shape mobility outcomes, centring on the concept of household objective well-being and leveraging disaster risk and resilience principles. We holistically define objective well-being as the set of capabilities required to meet household needs (ranging from physiological ones related to survival to self-actualisation ones related to personal growth), representing its loss and recovery in response to natural hazards. Human mobility then emerges as a forced (involuntary) reaction to, or an impossible outcome because of objective well-being loss, or else as a proactive (voluntary) strategy for objective well-being recovery. The framework is intended to act as a substantive contribution towards improving future modelling efforts in estimating disaster-induced human movements. Natural hazards can influence human mobility by affecting household well-being, loss and recovery, and the decision to move voluntarily or be forced to move, according to a holistic capability-based, disaster-risk-informed approach
Authors
- Carmine Galasso (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5445-4911)
- Giulia Brutti
- Gemma Cremen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6699-7312)
Institutions
- University College London (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Communications Earth & Environment
- Published
- 2026-06-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03709-3
- Primary Topic
- Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00