The first visible signs of Africa’s climate migration wave rarely appear as caravans or long marches. They appear as congested bus stops, swelling informal settlements, rising food prices, overcrowded schools, and the quiet disappearance of rural labour. From northern Nigeria to the Horn of Africa and the Congo Basin, climate shocks are accelerating a long-running movement: millions leaving stressed agricultural zones for cities that were never designed to absorb them. Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam — already among the fastest-growing cities on Earth — now sit at the front line of this demographic redirection.

The Invisible Majority: Internal Migrants, Not Cross-Border Refugees

Popular narratives often depict Africans fleeing the continent. The data reveal a different picture. Roughly 75–80% of African migration happens within national borders, not across them. Most climate migrants are moving from rural low-productivity zones toward expanding urban centres, creating a silent redistribution of people that rarely enters political debate until it overwhelms infrastructure.

How Climate Stress Pushes Mobility

The drivers differ by region. In the Sahel, desertification and erratic rainfall are reducing viable farmland and pastoral routes. In the Horn of Africa, successive droughts followed by sudden floods have destroyed harvest cycles. In central Africa, deforestation and rainfall volatility are eroding smallholder resilience. Climate acts less like a single shock and more like a pressure system, tightening year after year until households can no longer hold their ground.

Urban Absorbers: Lagos, Nairobi & Kinshasa

Africa’s three largest Anglophone metropolitan regions illustrate how climate migration converges on cities with magnetic labour markets — even when those labour markets are strained.

Why Cities Keep Growing Despite Weak Absorptive Capacity

The paradox of Africa’s urbanisation is not why cities grow, but why they grow so fast despite visible dysfunction. For climate migrants, the comparison is not between an ideal city and a deteriorating one. It is between a collapsing rural livelihood and an uncertain, but diversified, urban one. Even precarious urban incomes often outperform failed harvests.

Land and Housing: The New Political Battleground

The most immediate tension appears in land markets. As newcomers settle on peri-urban edges and floodplains, informal subdivisions multiply and tenure becomes contested. Municipal authorities oscillate between evictions, quiet tolerance, and strategic regularisation. Housing becomes both a humanitarian problem and a political currency.

Labour Shocks and Informal Economies

Climate migration expands the informal workforce, often faster than cities can create formal jobs. Markets swell with new entrants, pushing wages down in casual sectors. For women, who form a significant share of internal migrants, unpaid care burdens and insecurity intensify. These pressures rarely show up in macroeconomic statistics but shape urban life in profound ways.

Security, Crime and the Urban Periphery

As settlements expand without services, crime networks, vigilante groups and informal authorities fill the gap. The peripheries of Lagos, Nairobi and Kinshasa illustrate how environmental stress can intersect with weak policing to draw fragile communities into cycles of extortion or insecurity.

When Climate Migration Meets Ethnic and Political Lines

Internal migration can unsettle local political equilibria. In parts of Kenya, new settlement patterns reshape voting blocs and fuel tensions over land and water. In Nigeria, disputes between host communities and incoming groups intensify where scarce resources meet identity politics. Climate migration, though driven by environmental shifts, becomes refracted through older grievances.

What Adaptation Looks Like for Fast-Growing Cities

Effective adaptation requires cities to stop treating internal migration as an anomaly. That means shifting from reactive flood response or eviction drives to long-term planning: formalising land tenure, expanding transit, integrating water management, and aligning social protection with mobility realities.