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Environmental aspects of internal migration in Tanzania

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Abstract

In recent years, the issue of the nexus of climate change and human migration has attracted a growing amount of interest among scholars and policy makers. Using individual-level data from the Tanzania National Panel Survey conducted in 2008–2009, we examine the roles played by droughts or floods, crop diseases, and severe water shortages in inter-district migration in Tanzania. Findings reveal that droughts or floods and crop diseases are associated with an overall decrease in the likelihood of inter-district mobility, providing support for the “environmental scarcity” hypothesis. Yet migration becomes a likely response to droughts and floods among individuals with no education suggesting mobility is a key livelihood strategy among those most disadvantaged. Future examination of domestic migration-environment processes at the individual-level is critical for informed policy and programs.

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Notes

  1. A classical example of migration as a copying mechanism is given by seasonal mobility patterns.

  2. The Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) is an ongoing research agenda within the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank with the goal of promoting and improving the collection of household-level data in developing countries around the world. Further information can be found at the web site: www.worldbank.org/lsms.

  3. All the questions of this section were administered to the household head or to most knowledgeable respondent of the household and provide information on different types of shocks which have negatively affected the household over the 5 years before the interview. We assumed that the information given by the household head is true for all the members of the household, which is a reasonable assumption, although a simplified one, given that in principle not all the household members were necessarily affected by the shock.

  4. Results not shown, but available from author on request.

  5. This approach specifies that the standard errors allow for (district) intra-group correlation, relaxing the usual requirement that the observations are independent: that is, the observations are independent across clusters (i.e., districts), but not within clusters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Cristina Ocello

  2. Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU), Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

    Maria Rita Testa

  3. Clinical and Descriptive Epidemiology Unit, Cancer Prevention and Research Institute (ISPO), Florence, Italy

    Cristina Ocello

  4. Department of Statistics, Informatics, Applications (DiSIA), University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Alessandra Petrucci & Daniele Vignoli

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  1. Cristina Ocello
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  2. Alessandra Petrucci
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  3. Maria Rita Testa
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  4. Daniele Vignoli
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Correspondence to Cristina Ocello.

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Ocello, C., Petrucci, A., Testa, M.R. et al. Environmental aspects of internal migration in Tanzania. Popul Environ 37, 99–108 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-014-0229-9

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