Migration can help villages adapt to climate change, but not everyone benefits equally

What is it about?

In many rural areas exposed to climate risks, families send members to work elsewhere, and this is increasingly seen as a way of adapting to climate change. But there is little evidence on for whom, where and under what conditions it really helps. This article follows families in four rural areas of Thailand and their migrant relatives in the Bangkok region, Singapore and Germany. Surveys of more than 1,000 households and several hundred interviews show that migration helped households diversify their income, pay for education and change farming practices. The benefits were uneven, though. Better-off households gained more, while poorer households depended heavily on remittances sent by relatives who often worked in precarious conditions. The article proposes a way of looking at families as networks spread across several places, and it describes five types of outcomes, from lasting gains for both sides to situations where migrants and families left behind both end up worse off.

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Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash

Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Migration is increasingly promoted as a way for people to adapt to climate change, but claims that it simply works, or simply fails, hide who actually benefits and who pays the price. This study shows that gains and costs differ between origin and destination, between households and between individuals, for example by gender, age and income. In Thailand, migration tended to reproduce existing inequalities rather than reduce them. Remittances can also pay for farming changes that harm the environment in the long run, such as more pesticides or new cash crops. For policymakers, the approach helps to identify where support is needed, for example for migrants' working conditions at destinations and for the poorest households at home, so that migration can contribute to adaptation more fairly.

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