Migration Across America: Climate Migration |Create a Future Movement Prediction

Migration Across America: Climate Migration |Create a Future Movement Prediction Report | Research + Geography Project | Grades 5–8

What happens when environmental change makes a place harder—or even dangerous—to call home?

This engaging no-prep research and project lesson introduces students to Climate Migration, an important movement that is already beginning and may become one of the major migration patterns of the future.

Students explore how rising seas, stronger storms, drought, water shortages, and wildfires can affect communities and eventually push people to relocate. They examine current evidence, consider where climate migration may occur, and use their research to make an evidence-based prediction about future population movement.

Students bring everything together by creating a Future Movement Prediction Report explaining the causes of climate migration, where it is beginning, how it may grow, and how communities might prepare and adapt.

Students Will Explore
- What climate migration is and how it happens
- Rising seas and coastal flooding
- Stronger storms and repeated disasters
- Drought and water shortages
- Wildfires and changing environmental conditions
- How environmental change affects homes, jobs, and communities
- Why people may choose to stay or relocate
- Current examples and evidence of climate-related movement
- How climate migration could grow in the future
- Where people might move from and where they might go
- How communities can adapt and prepare
- How evidence can be used to make and defend future predictions

What’s Included
- Teacher Directions
- Topic Overview & Mini Research Questions
- 5-Step Group Activity
- Student Research & Understanding Pages
- Future Movement Prediction Report Planning Page
- Climate Migration Mapping Activity
- Digging Deeper Analysis
- Evidence-Based Prediction Activities
- Color and Black & White Versions
- Future Movement Prediction Report Project

Why Teachers Love It
✓ No prep — ready to print and use
✓ Introduces students to a highly relevant modern migration topic
✓ Connects geography, environmental science, social studies, and human movement
✓ Moves beyond basic research into prediction and evidence-based reasoning
✓ Helps students understand the connection between environmental change and human decisions
✓ Gives students meaningful space to organize research and take notes
✓ Encourages students to distinguish between what is happening now and what could happen in the future
✓ Explores both the reasons people may stay and the pressures that may cause them to move
✓ Incorporates mapping and geographic thinking
✓ Challenges students to consider how adaptation could change future outcomes
✓ Develops research, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication skills
✓ Works with groups, partners, or independent students

Perfect For
- Grades 5–8
- U.S. Geography
- U.S. History
- Human Geography
- Migration studies
- Climate and environment units
- Environmental science connections
- Research projects
- Project-Based Learning
- Enrichment or sub plans
- Homeschool instruction

Part of the Migration Across America Series
This resource is part of the Migration Across America series, which explores major movements of people throughout American history and into the present and future. Across the series, students investigate why people move, where they go, what they experience, and how migration reshapes individuals, communities, and the United States.

Designed to Fit Your Classroom
Every classroom is different. Teachers are encouraged to adapt, modify, shorten, extend, or differentiate this resource to meet their students, curriculum, available class time, and instructional goals.

Migration Across America: Climate Migration — Create a Future Movement Prediction Report asks students to do something different from studying migration that has already happened: use what we know today to think carefully about what could happen tomorrow.