Climate Change and Migration: Is Agriculture the Main Channel?

by Chiara Falco, Marzio Galeotti and Alessandro Olper

Migration and climate change are two of the most important challenges the world currently faces. They are connected as climate change may stimulate migration.
One of the sectors most strongly affected by climate change is agriculture, where most of the world’s poor are employed. Climate change may affect agricultural productivity and hence migration because of its impact on average temperatures and rainfall and because it increases the frequency and intensity of weather shocks.
This paper uses 50 years of data, from 1960 to 2010, for more than 150 countries to analyse the relationship between weather variation, agricultural productivity and migration. Our main findings are that, in line with theoretical predictions, negative shocks to agricultural productivity caused by weather fluctuations significantly increase migration in middle and lower income countries but not in the poorest and in the rich countries. The results are robust to different econometric specifications.