Population Mobility and Monsoon Anomalies in Pakistan

Clark Gray, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Katrina Kosec, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Valerie Mueller, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Widespread migration attributed to natural disasters receives substantial attention in policy circles. While recent work quantifies relationships between individual migration and climate, the conventional narrative surrounding the notion of environmental refugees concerns the displacement of entire households. To our knowledge there are no quantitative studies which differentiate the impacts of natural disasters on the mobility of individuals versus entire households. Our longitudinal survey provides a unique opportunity to understand how extant sedentary households use the migration of their members to manage risk, and to learn about the degree of environmental displacement in existence. It does so by covering detailed mobility patterns of individuals within households and of entire households in Pakistan, a region that is highly vulnerable to climate change and involuntary displacement, over the past 21 years. We examine how various migration patterns respond to monsoon conditions using discrete-time event history models. Several specifications are estimated to verify robustness.