The Influence of Climate on Migration

• Author: Dennis Wesselbaum
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8462.12345
• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Date: 01 September 2019

The Australian Economic Review, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 363–372 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8462.12345

For the Student

The Influence of Climate on Migration

Dennis Wesselbaum*

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of research

into the phenomenon of whether climatic

factors, such as temperature and weather‐

related disasters, affect the decision to

migrate. As an example, we examine migra-

tion flows from 198 countries to Australia for

the time span from 1980 to 2015. Our results

show that temperature does not have a robust,

significant effect on migration flows, while

weather‐related disasters do significantly

affect flows to Australia.

1. Introduction

Recently, the effects of climate variables, such

as temperature, rainfall and weather‐related

disasters, have attracted attention as additional

drivers of migration flows (cf. Beine and

Parsons, 2015; Cattaneo and Peri, 2016;

Aburn and Wesselbaum, 2019).

There exist various channels through which

climate variables can affect the migration

decision. Changes in temperature and rainfall

patterns, and the incidence, likelihood and

frequency of weather related disasters, that is,

climate change (cf. IPCC, 2012), impact

economies and human behaviour.

A key channel works through a reduction in

agricultural productivity (cf. Burke et al.,

2015; Lesk et al., 2016) and the associated

increase in agricultural income risk. While

this is particularly relevant for countries that

depend largely on the agricultural sector,

climate change will also negatively affect

income in developed countries.

Various studies (cf. Hsiang, 2010; Dell et al.,

2012,2014; Deryugina and Hsiang, 2014) have

shown that temperature has a negative effect on

income. Similarly, Heal and Park (2016) and

Heal et al. (2018) show that temperature stress

has negative effects on labour productivity.

Further, health conditions can deteriorate (cf.

WHO, 2009) and climate‐driven conflicts over

scarce resources can increase (cf. Burke et al.,

2009). All these effects will be particularly

strong in countries that do not have strong

recovery mechanisms in place, such as insur-

ance, internal mobility and social protection (cf.

McAdam, 2011).

* University of Otago, Department of Economics, P.O.

Box 56, Dunedin 9054 New Zealand <dennis.

wesselbaum@otago.ac.nz>.

© 2019 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research,

Faculty of Business and Economics

Published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd