Hoffmann, R., Dimitrova, A., Muttarak, R. et al. A meta-analysis of country-level studies on environmental change and migration. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 904–912 (2020)

Objective:

• There is little concensus concerning the direction and the extent to which these factors influence migration

Case:

• Global

Methodology:

• Regression: $M_{ct} = \alpha + E_{ct}\beta +C_{ct}\gamma +\theta_c +\tau_t + \epsilon_{ct}$
  • $\beta_{stan,im} = \mu_m + D_{im}\delta +\mu_{im}$

Data Source

• Meta: Article

Findings:

• 27 of the 30 considered studies come to the conclusion that environmental factors are a relevant migrantion driver
• Environmental conditions can either directly influence migration decisions or indirectly by affecting other migration drivers

• a one standard deviation change in the environmental conditions leads to an increase in migration by 0.021 standard deviation
• While changes in the level of precipitation tend to have only a small impact on migration, changes in variability and anomalies of rainfall usually show a significantly positive impact

• Considering global migrant, larger environmental effects for internal migration than for estimates
• Considering international migrant, the effects are largest for the models assessing migration to low- or middle- income country destinations

Coding Reference:

• R and Data