Country-specific effects of climate variability on human migration

Abstract

Involuntary human migration is among the social outcomes of greatest concern in the current era of global climate change. Responding to this concern, a growing number of studies have investigated the consequences of short to medium-term climate variability for human migration using demographic and econometric approaches. These studies have provided important insights, but at the same time have been significantly limited by lack of expertise in the use of climate data, access to cross-national data on migration, and attention to model specification. To address these limitations, we link data on internal and international migration over a 6-year period from 9,812 origin households in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Senegal to high-resolution gridded climate data from both station and satellite sources. Analyses of these data using several plausible specifications reveal that climate variability has country-specific effects on migration: Migration tends to increase with temperature anomalies in Uganda, tends to decrease with temperature anomalies in Kenya and Burkina Faso, and shows no consistent relationship with temperature in Nigeria and Senegal. Consistent with previous studies, precipitation shows weak and inconsistent relationships with migration across countries. These results challenge generalizing narratives that foresee a consistent migratory response to climate change across the globe.

Climate Change, Agriculture and Migration: A Survey

“…Consequently, human migration induced by environmental factors might become a complex social outcome of great concern for both origin and destination countries. A growing number of research works have been investigating the consequences on migration of short-, medium-, and long-term climate variability using different econometric approaches [49]. Several conflicting results can be found in the literature highlighting how climate-induced migration is a complex phenomenon, which depends on a variety of specific socio-economic conditions [50].…”

“…The main argument is that rural populations affected by climate shocks first move into cities, raising urbanization rates and exacerbating social-economics conditions. Then, some of them may positively evaluate migration abroad to improve their economic condition due to an increasing pressure on wage rates because of the higher number of individuals in search of a job [49].…”

“…Results are still robust when applying an IV probit regression. Data on internal and international migration in 2004-2009 period from 9812 origin households, in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, have been analyzed at the district-level by [49]. By means of a negative binomial regression model, the authors show that climate change has country-specific effects on migration.…”

Social protection as a strategy to address climate-induced migration

“…The dominance of internal migration is explained by the fact that there are barriers to migration, such as costs, uncertainty and social exclusion, which are especially related to cross-border and long-term migration (Barnett and Webber, 2010;Gray and Mueller, 2012a). The often-stated assumption that permanent international migration will increase as a result of climate change has no substantial empirical evidence (Gemenne, 2011;Gray and Wise, 2016;Tacoli, 2009). …”

“…A key requirement for an effective strategy is to address the different stages -before, during and after -and different outcomes of climate-induced migration: no, temporary or permanent movements (UNFCCC, 2016a). The diversity of migration outcomes across time, distance and context makes it difficult to implement one single approach (Gomilova, 2016;Gray and Wise, 2016). Johnson and Krishnamurthy (2010), one of the rare papers focusing on the role of social protection to address migration, analysed how social protection programmes can facilitate economic, predominantly international migration as a means to climate risk management.…”