Climate Risk, Land Loss, and Migration: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Bangladesh
Creators: name: Rudolph, Lukas
name: Koubi, Vally
name: Freihardt, Jan
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Bangladesh
subject: migration
subject: riverbank erosion
subject: flood
subject: quasi-experiment
subject: climate change
subject: survey

description: Pre-registration for the pilot study in 03/2021 General project description: Global climate change is one of the most important and severe challenges the international community has ever faced. Existing evidence shows that climatic changes will have far-reaching repercussions for ecosystems and humans alike. Moreover, projections expect climate change to induce mass-population movements (migration), due to drought, sea level rise, or extreme weather events, particularly in low-income countries with low capacity to protect themselves and adapt to climatic changes. However, these projections are largely based on extrapolations from the population at risk of experiencing adverse climate events. The recent literature on climate change therefore highlights that projections on human displacement should account for the possibility that people might adapt to changing climatic conditions. This is particularly relevant to slow-onset environmental changes, such as drought and sea-level rise, where individuals and societies can anticipate such changes and take precautionary measures. With this project, we aim at contributing to a better understanding of whether, when, and how environmental/climatic changes lead to human migration. The overarching research question in this project is: How does environmental change affect internal migration flows? Additional research questions pursued in this project include: - Do citizens correctly perceive environmental changes and associate these with climate change? - How are migration aspirations influenced by exposure to an environmental event and how do they relate to actual migration moves? - What are the relevance and characteristics of trapped populations? - What is the influence of the local institutional and political context on exposed households' decisions to migrate? - Is migration an adaptive response to climatic changes or a maladaptive one? - Do individuals’ perceptions of different types of climatic events affect their level of support towards mitigation and adaptation policies? Empirically, we focus on a particular population, people living along the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. This population is exposed to two major environmental risks: riverbank erosion, which can be both gradual and sudden, and flooding. The former, riverbank erosion, is the major focus of this study. We will collect micro-level data to compare affected and unaffected populations at a similar baseline risk of riverbank erosion, as well as migrants and non-migrants from the very same area. The aim is to isolate the causal effect of deteriorating livelihoods due to adverse environmental conditions on migration. The project will thus provide valuable insights of broader relevance into whether and how societies react, or could react, to slow-onset climatic changes such as sea-level rise, drought, and soil/water salinity. Moreover, the methodology developed in the project can be applied to other cases and thereby inform prediction models of future climate-induced migration rates. Similarly, the findings could be utilized by institutional actors at both local, national and international levels when seeking to identify policy options to increase the adaptive capacity of populations vulnerable to climatic changes.