Extreme Weather Events and Internal Migration: Evidence from Mongolia

Julian Roeckert,Kati Kraehnert

doi:10.1007/s41885-021-00100-8

Abstract

This article examines the effects of extreme weather events on internal migration in Mongolia. Our focus is on dzuds, extremely harsh winters characterized by very cold temperature, snowfall anomalies, and/or storms causing very high livestock mortality. We exploit exogenous variation in the intensity of extreme winter events across time and space to identify their causal impacts on permanent domestic migration. Our database is a time series of migration and population data at provincial and district level from official population registries, spanning the 1992-2018 period. Results obtained with a two-way fixed effects panel estimator show that extreme winter events cause significant and sizeable permanent out-migration from affected provinces for up to two years after an event. These effects are confirmed when considering net change rates in the overall population at the district level. The occurrence of extreme winter events is also a strong predictor for declines in the local population of pastoralist households, the socio-economic group most affected by those events. This suggests that the abandonment of pastoralist livelihoods is an important channel through which climate affects within-country migration.

Highlights

Extreme weather events, like droughts, floods, storms, and hot spells, cause considerable economic losses
The effect of extreme winter events on the net migration rate in affected provinces remains statistically significant, it is slightly smaller in magnitude, two years after an extreme weather event
The marginal effects of the lagged extreme weather event on the net migration rate for individual regions are negative and significant in the Western, Khangai, and Central regions, while it is positive and significant for the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. This finding is in line with qualitative reports suggesting that internal migration in Mongolia is driven by rural-to-urban migration

Summary

Introduction

Like droughts, floods, storms, and hot spells, cause considerable economic losses. The district-level analysis confirms these results: We find a significant, negative, and strong effect of extreme weather events on the net population change rate across districts.

Results

Conclusion