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

By Ruohong Cai, Shuaizhang Feng, Mariola Pytlíková, M. Oppenheimer. Social Science Research Network, 2016

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While there is considerable interest in understanding the climate-migration relationship, particularly in the context of concerns about global climatic change, little is known about underlying mechanisms. We analyze a unique and extensive set of panel data characterizing annual bilateral international migration flows from 163 origin countries to 42 OECD destination countries covering the last three decades. We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between temperature and international outmigration only in the most agriculture-dependent countries, consistent with the widely-documented adverse impact of temperature on agricultural productivity. In addition, migration flows to current major destinations are especially temperature-sensitive. Policies to address issues related to climate-induced international migration would be more effective if focused on the agriculture-dependent countries and especially people in those countries whose livelihoods depend on agriculture.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7db2668e7b158943bfd8b00754486cf8e062b42

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Citations in the corpus

Climate change and migration: Is agriculture the main channel? (2019, background): “On the other hand, the different strategy used by Cai et al. (2016) and Cattaneo and Peri (2016), although robust from an econometric point of view, confirm only the existence of an indirect association between climate change, the importance of agriculture and migration.”
The Migration Response to Increasing Temperatures (2016, background): “…of extreme weather events, we also include the incidence of droughts, ﬂoods, storms and extreme heat as controls. advantage of these data is that they include migrations from 116 countries to 116 countries, so many more destinations than only considering OECD (as done in Cai et al 2014).”
A meta-analysis of the literature on climate change and migration (2021, background): “This is the case, for example, in papers of Cattaneo and Peri (2016), Coniglio and Pesce (2015), Marchiori et al. (2012), and Gray and Mueller (2012a). A recent development of the literature emphasizes the importance of existing mitigating mechanisms of climate change to rationalize the immobility p”
The Effect of Air Pollution on Migration: Evidence from China (2017, unknown): “Although recent literature has paid more attention to environmental factors, most of these studies focus on weather (Feng et al., 2010, 2015; Cai et al., 2016a; Jessoe et al., 2018).”