Abstract
Recent research suggests that climate change is affecting the rates and patterns of migration around the world in complex ways. While environmental stress sometimes compels people to migrate for their safety or to access livelihood opportunities, environmental stress can also inhibit mobility. Descriptive data from the highly vulnerable region of coastal Bangladesh offers insight into how environmental migrants may differ from other migrants. Those who migrate in disaster-affected years are on average older, shoulder more household responsibilities, and are more often engaged in high-risk agricultural livelihoods. Scholarship on climate migration stands to benefit from the perspectives and approaches pursued in the Family Studies literature and vice versa. The question of when and why households pursue migration in the face of stress has high relevance for the field of family studies, and climate migration data offers a window into family dynamics in the face of mounting climate pressure. I seek to identity points of intersection and opportunities across the two fields, as well as opportunities for future research.
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Notes
- 1.
A full discussion of the range of methods used in this literature is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a more complete review of methods used in this field, including the use of census data, national registries, surveillance methods, agent-based or dynamic models, and qualitative approaches, please see, e.g., Eklund et al., 2016; Fussell et al., 2014; Hoffmann et al., 2021; Piguet, 2010.
- 2.
If a community had fewer than 200 households, all were included in the survey, and the remaining sample was reallocated to more populated communities.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (CNH-1716909 and BCS-2149191) and the Office of Naval Research (#N00014-11-1-0683). This manuscript was also supported by the University of Colorado Population Center (Project 2P2CHD066613-11), funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I wish to thank Katharine Donato for comments on this analysis.
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Carrico, A.R. (2023). Family Well-Being in the Context of Environmental Migration. In: Ortiz, S.E., McHale, S.M., King, V., Glick, J.E. (eds) Environmental Impacts on Families. National Symposium on Family Issues, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22649-6_4
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