Country-Specific Effects of Climate Variability on Human Migration

Clark Gray, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Erika Wise, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

A growing number of studies over the past five years have integrated demographic and climatic data to investigate the effects of climate variability on human migration. These studies have revealed that negative climatic conditions tend to have positive effects on migration as expected, but that nonlinearity and heterogeneity are common. Two major limitations of these studies have been the unsophisticated use of climate data and the inability to compare climate-migration relationships across countries or regions. We address both of these limitations in a new analysis of retrospective survey data from Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso and Senegal along with two climate data sources. We link households’ reports of out-migrants to province-level climate histories and investigate their relationship using cluster-adjusted Poisson regression models. Preliminary results suggest that temperature has significant effects on migration as expected, but that the direction of the effect can differ across countries.