Residential mobility responses to home damage caused by floods, cyclones and bushfires in Australia

Abstract

Recent climate disasters serve as a reminder of the growing—yet overlooked—risk of climate-driven displacement in the Global North. This paper contributes to a nascent literature on disaster-induced mobility in high-income countries by extending the evidence to a new context: Australia. Applying propensity score matching to panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we conduct the first causal assessment of the impact of home damage caused by extreme weather events on residential mobility in Australia. Our findings suggest that from 2009 to 2022, an annual average of 1.6% of Australians aged 15 + (or ~ 308,000 people a year) experienced home damage caused by floods, cyclones or bushfires. Such damage increases the probability of changing address within 1 year by 56%, displacing an annual average of 22,261 Australians. Cumulatively, this amounts to ~ 312,000 people displaced by climate-induced home damage between 2009 and 2022. Importantly, this type of climate-induced mobility is not evenly spread across the population. Contrary to findings from the Global South, we find no evidence of “entrapment effects”, except for uninsured homeowners. Instead, our results indicate that over 80% of climate-displaced Australians come from the bottom two income quartiles, with the poorest 3% accounting for 14% of the displaced population. The most disadvantaged Australians thus face a double vulnerability: they are both more likely to sustain home damage from extreme weather events and more likely to be displaced. These findings bear important implications for adaptation strategies and policy responses to natural disasters.