Abstract
Abstract. Human migration is both motivated and constrained by a multitude of socioeconomic and environmental factors, including climate-related factors. Climatic factors exert an influence on local and regional population density. Here, we examine the implications of future motivation for humans to migrate by analyzing today's relationships between climatic factors and population density, with all other factors held constant. Such “all other factors held constant” analyses are unlikely to make quantitatively accurate predictions, but the order of magnitude and spatial pattern that come out of such an analysis can be useful when considering the influence of climate change on the possible scale and pattern of future incentives to migrate. Our results indicate that, within decades, climate change may provide hundreds of millions of people with additional incentive to migrate, largely from warm tropical and subtropical countries to cooler temperate countries, with India being the country with the greatest number of people with additional incentive to migrate. These climate-driven incentives would be among the broader constellation of incentives that influence migration decisions. Areas with the highest projected population growth rates tend to be areas that are likely to be most adversely affected by climate change.
Highlights
Human migration is a complex socioeconomic phenomena driven by mixture of historical, political, cultural, economic, and geographical factors (Black et al, 2011; Boas et al, 2019; Foresight: Migration and Global Environmental Change, 2011; Greenwood, 1985) – often by the need to adapt to environmental stressors (Adger et al, 2014) including those caused by climate change (Missirian and Schlenker, 2017; Myers, 1993; Núñez et al, 2002; Stapleton et al, 2017)
To estimate the influence of climate on the attractiveness of different locations, we apply the historical relationship between climate variables and population density along with projections (Taylor et al, 2012) of future climate change from the output of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) under Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs; Vuuren et al, 2011), including RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5, incorporating future country-scale demographic population projections from the United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2015 (United Nations, 2015)
Applying our regression equation to climate model and demographic projections, we find that Ni,y is negative in regions that are already hot and are projected to experience substantial additional warming under climate change, whereas Ni,y is positive in cooler regions
Summary
Human migration is a complex socioeconomic phenomena driven by mixture of historical, political, cultural, economic, and geographical factors (Black et al, 2011; Boas et al, 2019; Foresight: Migration and Global Environmental Change, 2011; Greenwood, 1985) – often by the need to adapt to environmental stressors (Adger et al, 2014) including those caused by climate change (Missirian and Schlenker, 2017; Myers, 1993; Núñez et al, 2002; Stapleton et al, 2017). We apply a simple and transparent approach to estimate the number and geographical distribution of people for whom temperature and precipitation changes may provide an additional incentive migrate. People are subject to a wide range of incentives and constraints; actual future migration will depend on a much broader set of factors (Adger et al, 2014; Boas et al, 2019; Greenwood, 1985).
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