Whether and to what extent climatic factors influence migration has received widespread public and scientific attention. In this paper, we focus on the impacts of increased aridity and drought on internal migration using novel census-based data for 72 countries covering the period 1960-2016. Analyzing information on 107,916 interregional migration flows, we find that drought and aridity have a significant impact on human mobility, particularly in the hyper-arid and arid areas of Southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Southern Asia. Migration is shaped by the level of wealth, agricultural dependency, and urbanization in the area of origin. Different age and education groups respond differently to droughts and aridity highlighting the importance of differential mobility patterns across population groups in different geographic contexts
