Climate Variability and International Migration: The Importance of the Agricultural Linkage

Abstract

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Dust Bowl Migrants: Identifying an Archetype

“…This paper relates to a broad literature on migration, which represents an important margin of economic adaptation. The Dust Bowl provides a rare opportunity to explore migration responses to a permanent collapse in the local environment, in contrast to more exploration of migration responses to more-temporary natural disasters and weather shocks (Piguet, Pécoud and de Guchteneire, 2011;Boustan, Kahn and Rhode, 2012;Marchiori, Maystadt and Schumacher, 2012;Bohra-Mishra, Oppenheimer and Hsiang, 2014;Cai et al, 2016;Deryugina, 2017;Deryugina, Kawano and Levitt, 2018;Boustan et al, 2019;Deryugina and Molitor, 2019;Mahajan and Yang, 2020;Spitzer, Tortorici and Zimran, 2020). The migration literature has long considered how migrant selection varies across contexts (Roy, 1951;Borjas, 1987), and characterizing the Dust Bowl migrants and their experiences provides an opportunity to refine this archetype of environmental refugee.…”

How climate change leads to emigration: Conditional and long‐run effects

“…(2015) and Cai et al. (2016) find that migration responds especially strong to climate variability in countries that are agriculture‐dependent. Climate change may also negatively affect health , for example, due to adverse health effects from extreme weather events (cold waves, heat waves, floods, etc. ), malnutrition (e.g., due to the effect of climate change on agriculture), and the increased spread of diseases (malaria, dengue fever, etc.)…”

Contextualizing Climate Change Impacts on Human Mobility in African Drylands

“…A second major channel through which climate change affects mobility outcomes is through its impacts on food production, water security, and health. Especially, issues related to food security have been shown to be an important determinant of both the desire and the decision to migrate (Cai et al., 2016; Sadiddin et al., 2019; Warner & Afifi, 2014). With climate change, agricultural production will become increasingly difficult in drylands, including for pastoralists, who may be forced to alter their mobility patterns in search for suitable grazing land and water (Boone et al., 2018).…”