Climate change, migration, and irrigation
Katrin Millock  1, *@  , Théo Bénonnier  2@  , Vis Taraz  3@  
1 : Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics  (EEP-PSE)  -  Website
Ecole d'Économie de Paris
48 boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris -  France
2 : Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay  (ENS Paris Saclay)  -  Website
École normale supérieure de Cachan - ENS Cachan
61 av du Pdt Wilson94230 Cachan -  France
3 : Smith College, Northampton, MA
Pierce Hall 204 21 West Street Northampton, MA 01063-6317 -  États-Unis
* : Corresponding author

A rapidly growing literature demonstrates that climate change will affect both international and internal migration. Earlier work has found important evidence of a climate-migration poverty trap: higher temperatures reduce agricultural yields, which in turn reduce emigration 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 explore the juxtaposition of these two facts. We test whether access to irrigation modulates the climate-migration poverty trap. Specifically, we test whether having access to irrigation makes migration less sensitive to high temperature shocks. Using a global data set on poor and middle-income countries and a fixed effects framework, we regress decadal international migration data on decadal averages of temperature and rainfall, interacted with country-level data on irrigated areas and income levels. We also analyze urbanization rates, which we take as a proxy for rural-to-urban internal migration. Our study finds that access to irrigation significantly weakens the climate-migration poverty trap, demonstrating a potentially important protective role for irrigation in the context of climate-induced migration. Our results demonstrate that other scholars working on climate and migration should be sure to consider the role of irrigation in modulating those relationships. From a policy point of view, our results suggest that increasing access to irrigation may have spillover effects onto migration. More broadly, our results speak to the need of simultaneously considering multiple adaptive responses when analyzing environmental challenges faced in developing countries.


footer.html