Examining the impact of climate change on migration through the agricultural channel: Evidence from district level panel data from Bangladesh

This paper studies how changes in climatic variables such as temperature and rainfall impact migration through agriculture. The authors use district level data (64 districts) for 3 inter-census periods (1974-1980, 1981-1990 and 1991-2000) to analyse historical migration related outcomes. Though the nexus between climate change and agriculture is well established, their links with migration are rather weak. The literature mostly uses natural disasters as a proxy for climate change in determining the impact of climate change on migration, though such disasters may or may not be related to climate change.

The authors find that fluctuations in temperature and rainfall contributed to a decline in agricultural productivity as measured by revenues from agriculture. Fixed Effect and Instrumental Variable estimations show that about one standard deviation decrease in real per capita agricultural revenue increases the net out-migration rate by 1.4 to 2.4 percent, controlling for unobserved effects for districts and years. Using our estimates and available forecasts in the literature, we predict that the net out-migration rate will be about 22 percent higher in 2030 than in 1990, assuming the variability in temperature stays stable and there are no behavioural responses from the farmers.