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Climatic factors as drivers of migration: a review

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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review the key contributions in the climate-migration literature and understand which environmental factors have been shown to robustly affect migration. We then discuss the findings on the channels through which climate affects migration. We find that there seems to be robust evidence that temperature affects migration, but the evidence for precipitation is inconclusive. Weather-related disasters affect migration, and it is important to investigate the effect of subcategories of disasters. In contrast to the existing survey papers, we highlight the question how climatic factors affect migration. Finally, we identify several open questions for the future.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Longhi et al. (2010) for a review of the literature on the impact of migration on labor markets and Genc et al. (2012) review the literature on the effects of migration on trade.

  2. Gröschl and Steinwachs (2017) and Aburn and Wesselbaum (2019) find no significant effect of droughts on migration, but Aburn and Wesselbaum (2019) find that more floods will increase migration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, 05405, USA

    Maya Moore

  2. Department of Economics, University of Otago, Dunedin,, 9054, New Zealand

    Dennis Wesselbaum

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  1. Maya Moore
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  2. Dennis Wesselbaum
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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 1.

Table 1 Summary of all panel studies (in alphabetical order).
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Moore, M., Wesselbaum, D. Climatic factors as drivers of migration: a review. Environ Dev Sustain 25, 2955–2975 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02191-z

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