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 having access to irrigation makes migration less sensitive to high temperatures.
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Why is it important?
Understanding the drivers behind international and internal migration is of paramount importance, particularly in light of accelerating climate change. We explore the effect 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 irrigation offsets the negative impact of higher temperatures on rural-urban migration in poor countries and fail to find evidence that it offsets the impact on international migration. This is the first article to integrate irrigation access into the analysis of migration for a global sample of countries.
Perspectives
We approached this question since agriculture is an important 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. Such work would allow for deeper analysis of irrigation as an alternative adaptation strategy to migration involving trade-offs between the adaptation strategies according to their costs, rather than as fixed existing infrastructure as in this analysis. However, in reality there is a broad set of adaptation strategies available in response to changes in climate, not merely just irrigation and migration, and it seems critical for the next wave of climate change adaptation research to consider interactions between 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.
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