Iris Weatherby meets me at a coffee shop in Burlington, Vermont, on a Tuesday morning in March 2035. She's in town consulting for the city's economic development office, though she won't say exactly what that consultation involves. Outside, early spring snow melts into the gutters—the kind of manageable, almost nostalgic winter weather that her clients pay her to market.
For the past seven years, Weatherby has worked as an independent consultant advising cities across the northern United States on what she calls "climate migration strategy," though she's quick to note that's not what anyone writes in the contracts. Her job, functionally, is to help places like Duluth, Syracuse, and Burlington attract people fleeing climate-vulnerable regions. She used to recruit software engineers for Bay Area tech companies. Now she recruits climate migrants. The skills, she tells me, are surprisingly transferable.
"I should clarify before we start," she says, stirring oat milk into her coffee, "that I'm speaking hypothetically about someone in my position. This is obviously a fictional conversation, because if I actually did this work, I'd have NDAs with half the cities in the Northeast." She grins. "But let's say, for argument's sake, that someone like me exists."
How did you go from tech recruiting to climate migration?
Iris: Pure accident. I was living in San Francisco in 2027, recruiting for a fintech startup, and I started noticing this pattern. Engineers would turn down offers—good offers, equity, the whole package—because they were planning to leave the Bay Area. Not for another tech hub. For places like Madison or Portland, Maine. They'd say things like "I'm thinking about my kids" or "the fire seasons are getting too intense" or just "I need to be somewhere with water."
And I realized nobody was fighting this talent war strategically. These northern cities were getting this incredible influx of educated, relatively wealthy people who were self-selecting for climate awareness and long-term thinking, and they were just letting it happen passively. No recruitment strategy, no competitive positioning, no narrative about why their city specifically was the right choice.
So I cold-emailed the economic development director in Duluth with a pitch: Let me apply tech recruiting principles to climate migration. They thought I was insane. Then they hired me for a three-month pilot.
What does climate migration recruitment actually look like?
Iris: Okay, so first—we never, ever call it that publicly. The messaging is always about "quality of life" or "economic opportunity" or "four-season living." You're selling a lifestyle upgrade that happens to include climate resilience. Because here's the thing: people who are ready to move for climate reasons don't want to think of themselves as climate refugees. They want to feel like they're making a smart, proactive choice. Like they saw around the corner.
The actual work has three phases. First, you identify your target demographics. And I mean really specific—not just "people in Phoenix," but "Phoenix homeowners aged 35-50 with kids, household income over $120K, professional-class jobs that can be done remotely, who've lived there less than ten years." Those are your prime candidates. They have the resources to move, they're not deeply rooted, and they're in the life stage where they're thinking about their children's futures.1
Second, you figure out what they're actually afraid of. This is where it gets... I mean, this is where someone in my position would need to be really careful about ethics. You're not creating fear—the climate risks are real—but you're definitely activating it. You're running targeted ads that show up right after a heat wave. You're getting local news coverage of your city's climate advantages timed to disaster events elsewhere. You're building content that ranks high when someone searches "best places to avoid climate change."
Third, you're creating infrastructure for conversion. And by infrastructure, I mean everything from housing developments marketed to climate migrants to job fairs in vulnerable cities to relocation assistance programs that are technically available to anyone but designed to appeal to your target demographic.
That sounds pretty manipulative
Iris: She laughs, but it's not a comfortable sound. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I think about this constantly, actually. There's this thing that happens where you start out thinking you're helping people make informed decisions—because you are! The climate risks are real! Moving to Burlington from Miami is objectively safer!—and then you realize you're also helping cities compete for the wealthiest, most educated climate migrants while people without resources get left behind.
I had this moment two years ago. I was presenting to a city council—not saying which one—and I showed them projections of tax revenue from incoming climate migrants. High-earning professionals, right? And one council member asked, very directly, "What happens to the people who can't afford to move here after we attract all these wealthy migrants and housing prices spike?"
The room just went silent.
Because nobody wants to say out loud that this is gentrification with climate characteristics.
The city manager eventually said something about how rising tax revenue would fund affordable housing initiatives, which we all knew was bullshit. The math doesn't work. You can't simultaneously attract wealthy migrants to boost your tax base and keep housing affordable for existing residents. Those are contradictory goals.
So why do you keep doing it?
Iris: Long pause. That's the question, isn't it?
Part of it is that I'm really good at this, and it's lucrative, and I've built expertise that's increasingly valuable as more cities figure out they need this. Part of it is that I genuinely believe I'm helping individuals make safer choices, even if the systemic implications are fucked.
But honestly? I keep doing it because someone's going to do this work. If it's not me, it'll be someone else—probably someone less conflicted about the ethics. At least I think about this stuff. At least I push back when cities want to do things that are overtly predatory.
There was a city last year that wanted me to help them target climate migrants from Puerto Rico specifically. They'd done the math—bilingual professionals, US citizens so no immigration issues, increasingly desperate to leave the island after the hurricane situation kept deteriorating. And I just... I couldn't. That felt like disaster capitalism in its purest form. So I turned it down.
She looks out the window at the melting snow. I don't know if that makes me ethical or just selectively unethical.
What have you learned about who actually moves versus who just talks about it?
Iris: Oh, this is fascinating. So remember those surveys showing that 57% of Americans say climate will influence their moving decisions?2 That's almost completely meaningless as a predictor of actual behavior. The gap between stated intentions and actual migration is enormous.
The people who actually move tend to fit a specific profile. They're usually in a transition moment anyway—job change, kids entering school, retirement, divorce. Climate becomes the deciding factor, but it's rarely the only factor. They've typically experienced a climate event personally. Not just read about it, but lived through it. A wildfire evacuation, a flood, a summer where the air conditioning costs tripled. And crucially, they have both the financial resources and the social flexibility to move. No aging parents they're caring for, no custody arrangements tying them to a location, no business with physical assets they can't liquidate.
The people who talk about moving but never do? Usually they're more rooted than they realize. They own property they can't sell for what they paid. They have extended family networks. Their identity is tied to place. Or—and this is really common—they're waiting for the situation to get bad enough to justify the disruption, but by the time it gets that bad, moving becomes much harder.
I've started thinking of it as the climate migration window. There's this period where moving is still relatively easy—housing markets haven't crashed in vulnerable areas, receiving cities haven't gotten expensive yet, you can still get insurance. But that window is closing. And people don't realize it until it's too late.
What's the future of this industry?
Iris: It's going to get much bigger and much more sophisticated. Right now, I'm one of maybe a dozen people doing this work full-time. In five years, there will be entire firms. Climate migration recruitment will be a standard part of economic development strategy for any city that can plausibly claim climate advantages.
You're already seeing private equity get involved—buying up housing in climate-safe cities, developing communities specifically for climate migrants, basically financializing climate displacement.3 There are real estate developers building entire neighborhoods in upstate New York marketed explicitly to people leaving coastal cities. They're not even subtle about it anymore.
And the targeting is going to get creepier. We're already using climate risk models combined with consumer data to identify households that should be worried but aren't yet. Imagine getting targeted ads about climate-safe real estate right after your homeowner's insurance premium doubles. Or seeing relocation content after you search for information about heat-related illness. It's coming.
The thing that keeps me up at night is that this is all going to accelerate inequality in ways we're not prepared for. The wealthy will move early and strategically. Everyone else will either stay in increasingly uninhabitable places or move later under much worse conditions—after property values collapse, after insurance markets fail, after the good jobs in receiving cities are taken.
She finishes her coffee. We're creating a climate migration system that works beautifully for the top 20% and fails everyone else. And I'm helping build it. So, you know, I'm doing great, thanks for asking.
Last question—where do you live?
Iris: She laughs, genuinely this time. I rent a one-bedroom in Burlington. I tell myself it's because I travel so much for work that buying doesn't make sense. But really? I don't want to be the person who bought property in a climate haven based on the same analysis I sell to cities. It feels too much like admitting what I'm actually doing.
Plus, if I'm wrong—if these northern cities become overcrowded climate migrant destinations with spiking costs and infrastructure strain and all the problems I'm helping create—I want to be able to leave easily.
She stands to go.
The ultimate climate migration strategy: keep your options open and don't get too attached to anywhere. I should put that in a marketing deck.