Can We Predict "Climate Migrations"? The 2018 Guatemalan Case
Abstract
Migrations are caused by multiple and entangled factors, making them in general virtually impossible to predict. Nonetheless, we expect that when the socio-economic vulnerability of the population surpasses a certain threshold but are not so high that households have expended all their assets, external drivers like intense or prolonged climate hazards can actually trigger "climate migrations". Once started, cumulative causation takes place with more and more people following the first wave of emigrants. Although the particular conditions to start a climate migration process are less common than the media suggests and are very context-specific, these events are potentially predictable in places where a good monitoring of the population vulnerability exists and where there is predictive skill for the concrete climate hazard triggering the migration as a demographic response. Here, we explore these ideas using the 2018 Guatemalan mass migration as an example of climate-induced population mobility. We first contextualize the socioeconomic vulnerability of the exposed Guatemalan population, especially those living in the so called "Dry Corridor", finding that the confounding role of an increasing infant mortality rate since 2012, a high food inflation rate (the fourth highest since 1996), and an increase in the unemployment rate set the stage for the climate migration that followed. In addition, the multi-year drought that was present during the previous three years acted as the final stressor by heavily increasing household debts via reduced staple crop harvests and limited access to unskilled employment in the agricultural sector. With this and other contextual information on past migrations, we then assess the predictive skill of this type of climate migrations for Guatemala, using an ensemble of realizations built with a set of different migration models.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC13E1213M
- Keywords:
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- 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1694 Instruments and techniques;
- GLOBAL CHANGE