Physiological costs of undocumented human migration across the southern United States border

Abstract

Dangerous terrain As climate change leads to regions of the world becoming increasingly uninhabitable, unregulated human migration is likely to increase. Migrants often traverse dangerous terrain, and the environmental conditions they encounter when exposed can be deadly. Campbell-Staton et al . used an approach commonly used to predict spatially explicit regions of physiological challenge in animal species to create a hazard landscape for the border crossing between the United States and Mexico. Their predictions of high risk, particularly due to dehydration, coincided with regions of high migrant mortality. Such detailed predictions may help to prevent these tragedies. —SNV