Climate variability and international migration: The importance of the agricultural linkage

While there is considerable interest in understanding the climate-migration relationship, particularly in the context of concerns about global climatic change, little is known about its underlying mechanisms. In the paper, we combine a rich panel data on annual bilateral international migration flows with an extensive data on climate variability across the countries to investigate in-depth the climate-migration link. We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between temperature and international outmigration only in the most agriculture-dependent countries, consistent with the widely documented adverse impact of temperature on agricultural productivity. Further, the temperature-migration relationship is nonlinear and resembles the nonlinear temperature-yield relationship. In addition, migration flows to current major destinations are especially temperature-sensitive. Policies to address issues related to climate-induced international migration would be more efficient if focused on the agriculture-dependent countries and especially people in those countries whose livelihoods depend on agriculture.