António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations very correctly remarks that "Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator." According to World Weather Attribution, responsible for linking extreme weather to climate change, the LA fires were made worse because of climate change. The climate in this area is predominantly hot and dry making it more prone to forest fires. Human beings have been constantly neglecting the warning signs intensifying extreme weather events, disrupting ecosystems, and threatening livelihoods worldwide. Temperature anomaly is believed to be the primary effect of climate change but it is just the start of the “highway”. Heatwaves and wildfires are becoming more frequent, making outdoor work difficult and increasing health risks. Severe storms, fueled by warmer oceans, cause devastating floods and economic losses. Droughts are worsening water shortages, reducing agricultural productivity, and expanding deserts, while rising sea levels threaten coastal communities. Several parts of the world have been experiencing intense climate change events underscoring the severity of the situation. When we particularly focus on the African continent, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia have experienced prolonged droughts, leading to food shortages and displacement of millions. Meanwhile, South Africa has suffered from severe floods, damaging homes and farmlands. These events barely scratch the surface of the escalating consequences of climate change.
Climate change is one of the major reasons that has dispersed millions of people in search of safer living conditions and economic opportunities. This displacement can be internally and internationally but an article in Migration Policy Institute clearly mentions that this migration typically takes place internally rather than internationally. The reasons for migration have 2 components: pull and push factors - the reasons why people leave their home country are called push factors and the reasons why people move to a different country are called the pull factors. These factors can be varied like economic, social, political, demographic and in recent times environmental factors have turned out to be a major reason for migration.
A lot of papers have studied migration caused due to climate change but most of them focus on international migration. One of the most cited paper that considers 226 nations finds little direct evidence of migration due to climate change, and instead suggests that it indirectly happens due to wage differentials. Considering migration in high-income regions like LA and the low-income regions like the countries in the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region, they will have stark differences. In LA, the migration might be very temporary due to access to insurance, government help and relocation resources. But the SSA countries might face more permanent migration due to economic and infrastructural resources and limited government help. In my paper, I have explored how climate change affects migration within the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region. A World Bank report said that internal climate migrants will make up about 85 million in SSA. Through this study I intended to fulfil certain gaps in the literature by using a completely new bilateral migration dataset from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). Focusing on the most recent time frame (from 1995-2020) when climate change peaked, I studied the effect of climate change on migration using the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood approach (PPML) It has its own advantages like effectively handles zero migration flows, it is robust to heteroskedasticity and avoids biases associated with log transformations, ensuring more reliable and efficient estimates.
For this study, the main climate variables that I have used are Temperature change(TempC) Rainfall anomaly index (RAI) and Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). Along with them I have also controlled for the number of people affected by natural calamities over the years in order to account for the devastating effects of those. As discussed above, there could also be various economic, political and social factors that affect migration, which I control for in my estimations.
When analysing the different push factors SPEI and TempC in the origin countries do not seem to cause migration but RAI has the capacity to do so under certain conditions. And the results after studying the pull factors show that colder temperatures do tend to attract migrants to the destination countries and higher rainfall anomalies in the destination countries discourage migration. The elements that influence migration across all models are distance, religious distance, and the dummy variables that represent contiguity and common language between countries, despite the additional control factors. This means that people are likely to migrate to countries in close proximity and countries where they speak the same language. When taking into account the heterogeneous effects, SPEI is thought to be a major push factor for women in origin countries and origin countries considered to be rich and highly urbanised. Furthermore, rich, coastal, and highly urbanised destination countries view RAI as a major pull factor. The study's robustness tests highlight the complexity of the factors influencing migration decisions, validity and consistency of the findings.
From this it is clear that not all the climate variables together turn out to be the main reasons for pull or push factors for migration. They are significant with certain controls concluding that migration decisions are very context driven. Based on the findings, we can also see that this climate induced migration need not be permanent; people might move temporarily to cope with climate shocks but return when conditions improve. Since proximity turned out to be a significant factor in all the regressions, it clearly shows that people move to places that are closer to the origin countries. Climate induced migration is present but in the absence of accurate data, it would be difficult to move to evidence-based policymaking in this domain. The need of the hour is to create policies regarding promoting climate-resilient infrastructure and services, bilateral contracts regarding temporary work programs, investments in climate-smart agriculture, among others.
The announcement by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on 28th January, 2025 about the doomsday clock being set one second closer to midnight should act as a wakeup call for us humans about how grave the problem of climate change is. It is now closer than ever, which is 89 seconds to midnight. Other than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the potential of a nuclear arms race, the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, one of the important reasons for this clock to get closer to midnight is the climate crisis. The clock is ticking therefore we need to act now in order to build a future where climate migration is not a last resort but a choice.
Netra Damani
