When the river breaks the land: Environmental (im)mobility among rural households in Bangladesh
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Date
2023
Publication Type
Doctoral Thesis
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Abstract
Global climate change is among the most important and severe challenges the international community has ever faced. Existing evidence shows that climatic changes will have far-reaching repercussions for ecosystems and humans alike. For instance, projections expect climate change to induce mass population movements due to hazards like droughts, sea level rise, or extreme weather events, particularly in low-income countries with limited capacity to protect themselves and adapt to such climatic changes. However, these projections are largely based on extrapolations from the population at risk of experiencing adverse climatic events. The recent literature therefore highlights that projections on climate-related migration should account for the possibility that people can adapt to changing climatic conditions. This is particularly relevant for slow-onset environmental changes such as droughts, salinization, or erosion, which individuals and societies can anticipate and adapt to. This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of whether, when, and how environmental changes lead to human migration.
Theoretically, I link environmental changes to individual-level migration decisions by applying the aspirations-capabilities framework. I argue that exposure to environmental changes can increase someone’s aspirations to move away, while such exposure also has the potential of eroding the capability to move. People will move if they have both the aspiration and the capability to move. If one of the two is lacking, people remain immobile. Importantly, this concept also allows to differentiate “involuntary non-migrants” who would like to move away but lack the capability to do so from “voluntary non-migrants” who could move away but do not want to.
Empirically, I employ a novel, self-collected panel data set of around 1700 household heads residing along the Jamuna River in northern Bangladesh, an area affected by riverbank erosion and flooding during the yearly recurring monsoon season. Through a multi-stage clustered sampling design, I obtained a sample representative of the rural population in the case study region. In a quasi-experimental approach, I surveyed respondents at a similar baseline risk of being affected before the environmental changes occurred. By re-interviewing both affected and unaffected respondents after the environmental changes have materialized, and both those who migrated and those who stayed, I can link any differences I observe between affected and unaffected respondents to the environmental shocks. This causal link makes a major empirical contribution to the literature on environmental migration that overwhelmingly applies secondary or retrospective data.
In the empirical chapter I, I examine how the populations along the Jamuna perceive environmental and climatic changes and I compare these perceptions to objectively measured data. I find that perceptions of long-term temperature changes are more in line with meteorological evidence than those of precipitation. This finding is remarkable given that most of the respondents do not know the term climate change. Further, respondents grossly overestimate the extent of erosion that has occurred in their village in the previous year. Since human behavior is shaped by their perceptions rather than by objective data, this underlines the importance of considering people’s perceptions rather than exclusively relying on natural scientific data.
Chapters II and III study how affectedness by riverbank erosion and flooding influences migration aspirations and migration behavior, respectively. The results suggest that riverbank erosion has a significant positive impact on both aspirations and the likelihood of migration. The effect of flood affectedness, by contrast, remains largely insignificant. This can be linked to the important role of flooding for the livelihood cycle of riverine populations, while erosion only has negative and potentially very detrimental effects on livelihoods.
Lastly, chapter IV studies immobility in the context of environmental changes. I show that a majority (83%) of those who stay put after the monsoon season qualify as “voluntary/acquiescent non-migrants”, while 17% of the non-migrants can be classified as “involuntary”. Environmental shocks increase the respondents’ migration aspirations while reducing their capability to move. Hence, they might lead to “trapped populations” – a term which describes individuals who would like to move away but cannot.
This dissertation provides valuable insights of broader relevance into whether and how societies react, or could react, to slow-onset climatic changes such as sea-level rise, drought, and soil/water salinity. Moreover, the methodology developed in the project can be applied to other cases and thereby inform prediction models of future climate-induced migration. Similarly, the findings could be utilized by institutional actors at local, national, and international levels when seeking to identify policy options to increase the adaptive capacity of populations vulnerable to climatic changes – supporting both those who would like to move and those who prefer to stay put.
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published
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Contributors
Examiner: Koubi, Vassiliki
Examiner: Rudolph, Lukas
Examiner : de Sherbinin, Alex
Examiner : von Uexkull, Nina
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Publisher
ETH Zurich
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Subject
environmental migration; riverbank erosion; Climate change; Disasters; Floods; Bangladesh; Quasi-experiment; Survey research; Panel data
Organisational unit
03446 - Bernauer, Thomas / Bernauer, Thomas
Notes
Funding
185210 - Climate Risk, Land Loss, and Migration: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Bangladesh (SNF)