Sea-Level Rise Exposure and Household Out-Migration in North Carolina

Climate-driven displacement is a growing public health challenge, but causal evidence on who relocates in response to environmental exposure, and who cannot, remains thin. Based at the UNC Flood Lab, this project addresses that gap for coastal North Carolina.

We link spatially resolved sea-level rise and flood exposure estimates from NOAA and FEMA to a longitudinal TransUnion credit panel covering over 500,000 individual residential histories in North Carolina from 1990 to 2020. The credit panel provides the residential mobility signal: address changes over time at scale, without the attrition problems of traditional survey-based panels. Applying IPTW, G-computation, and TMLE to this linked dataset, we estimate how graded coastal inundation risk shapes households’ decisions to relocate, distinguishing voluntary moves from constrained staying, which falls disproportionately on lower-income and less-mobile populations. This work is a collaboration with Garcia, Hino, Kwass-Mason, and Yan at the UNC Flood Lab.