Too rare to dare? Leveraging household surveys to boost research on climate migration.

This article critically examines the potential and limitations of nationally representative multi-topic household surveys, particularly the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), for researching the climate–migration nexus. It highlights challenges such as small migrant sample sizes, inconsistent migration definitions, limited tracking of migration episodes, and the lack of integrated climate data, while emphasizing the surveys' strengths like longitudinal design, georeferencing, and rich socioeconomic and agricultural information. The paper proposes methodological improvements—including standardized migration modules, enhanced data on migration intentions, adaptation strategies, and climate perceptions—and advocates for integrating household surveys with non-traditional data sources (e.g., big data, remote sensing) to better capture both slow- and fast-onset climate events and their migration impacts. Practical guidance is offered for researchers to maximize existing survey data, such as using households rather than individuals as units of analysis to mitigate rare event issues, and constructing adaptation indices to explore migration–adaptation dynamics, especially in low- and lower-middle-income countries.