The causal nexus that links climate change and migration is definitely among the most urgent issues both at national and international level. If, on the one hand, recent studies have shown that migration flows from vulnerable regions are related to climate change, on the other, up to this point, literature is not advanced enough to uniquely identify the underlying dynamics of this strong linkage.
According to its regional and socio-economic features, Western Africa is one of the best regions to study climate-induced migrations, since the increase in desertification and in average temperatures is reducing agricultural productivity - major source of income of the region -. In this region, migration is often selected by households as the most feasible strategy to improve their living conditions.
Hence, analysing detailed micro-data collected from household-level surveys and detecting how agests disposition varies in reaction to climate change effects in Wester Africa allows for consolidating the understanding of climate-induced migrations and for setting effective policy interventions to cope with climate-induced migrations.
The relationship between climate-induced and migration is assuming increasing relevance in academic research. As previously mentioned, so far research on this topic can be considered at an early stage, therefore, this project will allow to enrich existing knowledge on the link between the two phenomena, with specific reference to the methodological issues.
The core innovation of my research consists in having access to household-level micro data collected in a sample of 10 Western African countries by a World Bank inquiry and applying them to perform a spatial economic analysis. Besides being completely comparable with those of Living Standard Measurement Survey of World Bank and extremely recent (collection process is ongoing), the collected data have two more advantages: i) geographical coordinate reference for each survey; ii) possibility to precisely know key features of each household.
As already illustrated in previous literature, household survey data are the useful tool to use when it comes to defining underlying mechanisms and designing policy interventions. In addition, the fact that these data are geocoded will ease the combination with other measures of climate and weather variability and agricultural productivity.
Hence, after a process of scrupulous dataset construction and analysis, it will be possible to understand and anticipate all possible household decisions with respect to their capacity to adapt to climate change effects. Applying spatial analysis to micro-data is a great innovation in the field of climate-induced migration, since the majority of literature so far is more concentrated in modelling the mobility response with either referring to the probability of household mobility or with gravity model. Few attempts have been made until now to capture also the spatial dimension of the phenomenon, as for example in Desmet et al. (2020), but never with such detailed micro-data.
Then, as for the interpretation of climate-induced migration phenomenon, another element of novelty of this research consists in identifying those mechanisms through which it is possible to justify the causal relationship between climate change and migration, and, thus, defining whether climate-induced migration can be considered as an effective adaptation strategy to cope with both climate change and conflicts, rather than a forced condition from which households in vulnerable regions have no way to escape.