Climate change, migration, and irrigation

Abstract

Climate change will affect both international and internal migration. Earlier work finds evidence of a climate-migration poverty trap: higher temperatures reduce agri- cultural yields, which in turn reduce emigration rates in low-income countries, due to liquidity constraints. We test whether access to irrigation modulates the climate- migration poverty trap, since irrigation protects crops from heat. We regress measures of international and internal migration on decadal averages of temperature and rain- fall, interacted with country-level data on irrigation and income. We find that irri- gation access significantly weakens the climate-migration poverty trap, demonstrating the importance of considering alternative adaptation strategies when analyzing climate migration.