Dr. Margot Reeves sits in her Vancouver apartment with the kind of posture that suggests she's been in this chair too long—shoulders curved toward her laptop, coffee mug leaving rings on papers that probably matter. Outside her window, construction cranes punctuate the skyline. She moved here from Sydney in 2027, one of the earlier waves of what she now professionally calls "climate-motivated relocation." These days, she studies climate migration patterns for the Pacific Institute for Climate Economics.
Which means she spends most of her time analyzing the phenomenon she's living through.
"The irony isn't lost on me," she says, before I even ask. "Though lately I've been thinking 'irony' is too polite a word."
You moved from Sydney eight years ago. Did you think of yourself as a climate migrant?
Margot: God, no. I took a job. A good job. Better money, research funding, university position. The climate thing was... okay, obviously it was part of it. The 2026 fires were biblical. The heat was relentless. My daughter was six and I kept thinking about what her twenties would look like there.
But I told everyone it was about career advancement. Told myself that too, mostly. "Climate migrant" sounded so desperate. Like people in documentaries with everything they own in a backpack. I had a moving company. A relocation package. Very different.
she laughs
I definitely mentioned the climate thing to my husband multiple times while convincing him to leave his entire family behind, though.
When did that framing start to feel insufficient?
Margot: 2031, maybe? That's when the data started showing me things I couldn't unsee in daily life. Vancouver's population had grown 22% since I arrived. Housing prices up 67%. I'd go to my daughter's school events and realize maybe a third of the parents had my exact story. Sydney, Melbourne, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Houston. All of us with good jobs and relocation packages. All of us very committed to the career opportunity narrative.
There was this community meeting about a development in East Van. An older woman stood up—she'd lived there forty years—and said, very quietly, "I used to know everyone on my block. Now I don't recognize anyone."
And I thought, oh. I'm the person she doesn't recognize.
Your research focuses on what you call "second-order displacement."
Margot: Right. First-order displacement is straightforward. Wildfire burns your house, you move. Hurricane floods your neighborhood, you relocate. But second-order displacement is what happens in the receiving cities.
We climate migrants—I'm including myself here—we tend to be relatively affluent. Professional jobs, savings, the ability to move internationally. When we arrive somewhere en masse, we don't just fill empty housing. We compete for it. We drive up prices. We change neighborhoods.
Vancouver's data is stark. Between 2025 and 2034, median rent increased 94%. Real wages for service workers increased 31%. You don't need a PhD to see the problem.
And it's not just Vancouver. Minneapolis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Melbourne, Christchurch.1 Anywhere that's marketed itself as a "climate haven" is experiencing this.
You put that in quotes.
Margot: Because it's marketing. Vancouver marketed itself as a climate refuge. Beautiful messaging about "welcoming climate migrants," about being a "city prepared for the future." And it worked! We came!
Turns out preparing for climate migrants mostly meant preparing the luxury condo market.
The city built 40,000 new housing units between 2026 and 2033. Want to guess how many were genuinely affordable? About 4,000. The rest were market-rate or luxury. Developers looked at the demographic data—educated, high-income climate migrants—and built accordingly.
Do you feel complicit?
very long pause
Margot: Yes. Obviously. I benefit from the system I'm critiquing. My salary has increased twice since I arrived because Vancouver's become this hub for climate research. Which exists because of climate migration. Which I'm part of.
My apartment has doubled in value. My daughter goes to a school that's gotten dramatically better resourced because of the tax base from people like us.
Last year I published a paper on climate gentrification in receiving cities. The journal wanted to interview me about it, and I remember thinking, "I am the climate gentrification." I'm not some abstract force in a model. I'm the person who moved into a neighborhood and changed it by being there.
What do you wish you'd understood in 2027?
Margot: That there's no such thing as a climate haven. Not really. There are just places where the timeline is different.
Vancouver's bought itself maybe twenty, thirty years before the climate impacts here match what I was fleeing in Sydney. But the ocean's still rising. The forests still burn. And now we've added this massive pressure of rapid population growth that the infrastructure wasn't built for.
Also—this is harder to articulate—I wish I'd understood that moving doesn't resolve the grief. I thought leaving Sydney would feel like escape. Instead it feels like watching two places I love struggle, and I'm not really home in either anymore.
My daughter has a Canadian accent now. When we visit Sydney, she's a tourist.
Your research suggests middle-income people are actually the least likely to migrate. Why?
Margot: They're trapped. The wealthy can afford to adapt in place. Install air conditioning, buy generators, hire private firefighters, absorb insurance cost increases. The poor often can't afford to leave. But middle-income people? They have enough to recognize the risk but not enough to easily absorb the cost of staying or leaving.2
And here's the cruel part: when they do move, they're arriving in cities where people like me have already driven up the cost of living. A teacher or a nurse who relocates from Phoenix to Vancouver for climate reasons finds that rent is triple what they paid in Phoenix.
The climate refuge has been priced out of reach by the first wave of migrants.
You've started advising cities on what you call "ethical climate reception." What does that look like?
Margot: laughs It means I spend a lot of time in city council meetings being deeply unpopular.
I'm arguing that cities need to prepare for climate migration by building truly affordable housing. Rent stabilization. Protecting long-term residents from displacement. Which means telling developers they can't just build luxury condos, and telling wealthy newcomers—people like me—that we need to accept limits on property values. Higher taxes to fund social housing.
You can imagine how well that goes over. I had a developer literally tell me last month that I was being "anti-growth" and "not understanding market realities."
I wanted to say, "I understand the market reality perfectly. I'm benefiting from it. That's why I know it's not sustainable."
Do you think you made the right choice moving here?
she stares out the window for a long time
Margot: I don't know. My daughter's safe. She's not growing up breathing smoke for three months a year. She's not watching the ocean eat the beaches I grew up on. That matters enormously.
But I think about the family who used to live in this apartment. I found a letter in a drawer when we moved in. They'd been here eleven years, got evicted when the building was sold and renovated. Where did they go? Probably somewhere cheaper, farther from the city center, with a longer commute. Did they stay in Vancouver at all?
The honest answer is I made the right choice for my family and probably the wrong choice for someone else's family. And I get to live with that. We all do—everyone who moved for climate reasons and had the resources to choose where we landed.
We're not villains. But we're not innocent either.
What do you tell people who are considering making a similar move now?
Margot: laughs darkly Nothing they want to hear.
I tell them that moving buys you time but creates new problems. I tell them that climate havens are already unaffordable and getting worse. I tell them the guilt is real and doesn't go away.
But I also tell them that staying in a place that's becoming uninhabitable isn't noble. It's just dangerous. So if you're going to move, do it with your eyes open. Understand that you're not escaping climate change, you're buying time. Understand that your presence will change the place you're moving to.
And maybe—this is the part that gets me called naive—maybe participate in making sure that change doesn't just benefit people like you.
she pauses, looking tired
In 2027, I thought I was solving a problem. Now I realize I was just shifting it. And climate change keeps making you live with the consequences of whichever impossible choice you made.