Lori Hunter, UC Boulder – Environmental Migration

Climate change and the environment at large have a huge effect on everything.

Lori Hunter, sociologist at UC Boulder, discusses the relationship between human migration and the natural environment, highlighting innovative research on US-Mexico migration associated with climate change.

Dr. Lori Hunter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder and Faculty Research Associate in the Institute of Behavioral Science. Hunter’s research and teaching focus on population-environment interactions with her primary research examining migration as a livelihood strategy among rural households in South Africa and Mexico. She has published extensively on this topic and others in academic outlets such as Society and Natural Resources, International Migration Review, and Population Research and Policy Review. Hunter is Associate Director of the CU Population Center, has been Editor-in-Chief of Population and Environment since 2007, and regularly undertakes research dissemination through collaboration with the Population Reference Bureau. In 2007, Hunter was a member of USAID’s Assessment Team tasked with examining Population-Health-Environment initiatives across the globe.

Environmental Migration

Environmental and climatic changes have shaped human mobility for thousands of years, and recently, research on migration and environment has proliferated.

A major concern is whether climate change will displace large numbers of vulnerable people, forced to move because of climate induced drought, flooding, rising sea levels and/or other extreme weather events.

A case in point is illustrated by our research on Mexico-US migration and climate change.  In many rural regions of developing countries, including Mexico, natural resource dependency means that changes in climate patterns impact livelihoods, and sometimes migration can become an important adaptive strategy.

With data from our “Mexican Migration Project”, we model US emigration from rural communities as relate to climate factors. The results suggest that households subjected to very recent drought conditions are less likely to send a US migrant, but in communities with a history of drought  at least two years prior, and strong migration histories, emigration is much more likely.

Human migration is a complex social process contingent on origin-and-destination based factors of which climate variability may be an important one.  As suggested by prior work in contexts as varied as Mali, Ethiopia, Nepal, and Burkina Faso on internal movement, the results presented here reveal intriguing associations between rainfall patterns and US-bound migration from rural Mexican households.

In regions lacking such social networks, rainfall deficits actually reduce migration propensities, perhaps reflecting constraints in the ability to engage in migration as a coping strategy.  Policy implications emphasize diversification of rural Mexican livelihoods in the face of contemporary climate change.

With regard to Mexico, the barrage of political pressure in the US to deal with immigration might benefit from shifting focus to origin areas where social, political, economic, and environmental pressures converge to shape household decision-making.

Read More: Rainfall Patterns and U.S. Migration from Rural Mexico