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When the Well Runs Dry, Where Do We Go Now? Exploring Internal Migration due to Climate Stress in Asia and Central and South America

Abstract

Whether the changing climate will lead to mass migration remains an unsettled puzzle for migration scholars. To this end, this poster aims to model internal migration flows taking into account socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental drivers. Migration flows and relevant socioeconomic information are obtained from Integrated Public Use Microdata Series for 15 countries in Central and South Americas and 11 countries in Asia over the period 1970-2011. Additionally, precipitation data are employed to identify drought events and rainfall variability which can be environmental driver of migration. Fitting a series of gravity-type spatial interaction models for each country and census year using Poisson regression, we find that people do move out from the areas frequently affected by drought to destinations that are generally more urban and have higher proportions of males. The shorter the distance between origin and destination the higher the migration, especially between contiguous geographical units

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