What is it about?
A rapidly growing literature demonstrates that climate change will affect both international and internal migration. Earlier work finds that higher temperatures reduce agricultural yields, which in turn reduces migration rates in low-income countries, due to liquidity constraints. On the other hand, other research demonstrates that irrigation can be effective in protecting agricultural yields from high temperatures. In this paper, we test whether irrigation access makes migration less sensitive to high temperatures.
Featured Image
Photo by Numeralia Vita Zein on Unsplash
Why is it important?
In light of accelerating climate change, understanding the drivers behind international and internal migration is of paramount importance. We explore the impact of increased temperatures on international migration and urbanisation rates and examine the role of irrigation access in shaping these relationships. Using a global data set of low- and middle-income countries, we find robust evidence that, in poor countries, irrigation offsets the negative impact of higher temperatures on rural-urban migration, but not on international migration. This is the first article to incorporate irrigation access into the analysis of migration for a global sample of countries.
Perspectives
We approached this question because agriculture is a key driver behind the climate-migration relationship and because irrigation seemed an important factor that had been overlooked in the climate-migration nexus. Our global analysis should be accompanied by more microlevel analyses using data on irrigation investments. This would enable a more in-depth analysis of irrigation as an alternative adaptation strategy to migration, taking into account the trade-offs between the different strategies according to their costs, rather than considering irrigation as fixed infrastructure, as was done in this analysis. In reality, however, a broad range of adaptation strategies are available in response to climate change, not just irrigation and migration. It is therefore crucial that the next wave of climate change adaptation research considers the interactions between these different forms of adaptation.
Dr Katrin Millock
Paris School of Economics
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Long-term migration trends and rising temperatures: the role of irrigation, Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy, October 2021, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/21606544.2021.1993348.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
