Your trip is short. Your reach is global.
You get one window to choose the ground that you, and the people after you, will stand on. Planning for it got easier: 7,368 countries, regions and cities, scored 0–100 on the same eight measures of how well a place holds up — safety, health, water, the institutions, the food — with the source and the confidence beside every number. The score is for now; only the climate and the water — and the age of a population, under the UN's medium variant — carry a 2050 value, under a named scenario, and the stability, the safety and the institutions are measured as they stand and never projected. It is dated, versioned, and says what it does not know.
The decisions are yours. This is the evidence — informational, not financial, legal or relocation advice.
Three readers
Three distances, and what the score can honestly say at each.
Your immediate future
The score for now: eight pillars for the place you are in and the two you are weighing, a failing pillar named where one fails. Any country, any region, any city over 150k — compared like with like, cities against cities, regions against regions.
Your retirement
Health, safety, water and heat for the years you would spend there, measured today; the 2050 climate horizon for the heat and the water you would grow old with. Affordability is scored wherever the price record reaches; residence-visa and foreign-ownership rules are scored for 8 countries so far, and the page says where they are not.
The future you leave to your grandchildren
2050 is the far edge of what the horizon models — the climate and the water under a named scenario, and the age of a population under the UN's medium variant, and nothing about the stability or the safety of a place. That is inside your grandchildren’s lifetimes; the great-grandchildren are past what any honest number reaches, and the page says so.
What it is for
They are the large decisions: whether to buy property in a country you have visited twice; whether stability is worth a move; whether to pursue a second passport; whether a place has earned a reconnaissance trip before you decide any of that. Habitance does not make those decisions. It informs them.
The same 0–100 measure of how well a place holds up, on every country, region and city; a separate Access score for what it costs to be there, with the legal side — residence visas, foreign-ownership rules — scored for eight countries so far and marked where it is not; 272 places scored but kept out of the rankings because the record on them is too thin. Citizenship is not scored anywhere, and no number here is about an individual property.
What could come after the score is a layer for the process itself: a directory of regulated advisers and destination counsel that lists, and never recommends, and carries no referral fee behind any name. That is proposed for Phase 3 and it is not built; if it arrives, it will say so. The reconnaissance trip is yours to plan — the site does not arrange one, and if it ever did, it would be through that same non-recommending directory and not on a commission.
7,368 places on the globe today, and the whole method on the methodology page.
Why now
The world is changing faster than the maps of it. The heat records, the water tables, the rules about who may live and own where — redrawn inside a decade, and the maps still show the last one. The 2050 the horizon shows is mostly already decided; the heat in it is largely committed by what has already been emitted. You do have time, but probably not as much as you think — because the window that is still open is not the one about what 2050 will be like. It is the one about where you are standing when it arrives. Habitance is here for that decision: the score for today, the climate horizon for the heat and the water, and every number with its source and its confidence. The decision stays yours.
— Eric Rehm