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The changing climate-migration relationship in China, 1989–2011

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Abstract

A persistent concern about the social consequences of climate change is that large, vulnerable populations will be involuntarily displaced. Existing evidence suggests that changes in precipitation and temperature can increase migration in particular contexts, but the potential for this relationship to evolve over time alongside processes of adaptation and development has not been widely explored. To address this issue, we link longitudinal data from 20 thousand Chinese adults from 1989 to 2011 to external data on climate anomalies and use this linked dataset to explore how climatic effects on internal migration have changed over time while controlling for potential spatial and temporal confounders. We find that temperature anomalies initially displaced permanent migrants at the beginning of our study period, but that this effect had reversed by the end of the study period. A parallel analysis of income shares suggests that the explanation might lie in climate vulnerability shifting from agricultural to non-agricultural livelihood activities. Taken together with evidence from previous case studies, our results open the door to a potential future in which development and in situ adaptation allow climate-induced migration to decline over time, even as climate change unfolds.

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Notes

  1. More specifically, the CRU grid cells were resampled to 1/9 their native resolution using bilinear interpolation from the four nearest cells, and then a spatial mean was taken over the resampled cells.

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Funding

This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development via grant R03-HD083528 to C. Gray and via grant P2C-HD050924 to the Carolina Population Center. This research uses data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), which are publically available here [http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/china]. For supporting CHNS, we thank the National Institute for Nutrition and Health, China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Carolina Population Center (P2C-HD050924, T32-HD007168), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the NIH (R01-HD30880, DK056350, R24-HD050924, and R01-HD38700) and the NIH Fogarty International Center (D43 TW009077, D43 TW007709) for financial support for the CHNS data collection and analysis files from 1989 to 2015 and future surveys, as well as the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Ministry of Health for support for CHNS 2009, Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai since 2009, and Beijing Municipal Center for Disease Prevention and Control since 2011. This research also uses data from the Climatic Research Unit, which are available here [https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/].

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  1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Clark Gray & Douglas Hopping

  2. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Valerie Mueller

  3. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, USA

    Valerie Mueller

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  1. Clark Gray
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  2. Douglas Hopping
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Correspondence to Clark Gray.

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Gray, C., Hopping, D. & Mueller, V. The changing climate-migration relationship in China, 1989–2011. Climatic Change 160, 103–122 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02657-x

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