Managing climate migration: Experimental evidence from Bangladesh
This project seeks to understand how knowledge about climate change and its effects on economic and health outcomes, such as crop yields and mortality, affects the migration decisions of individuals from rural Bangladesh.
While some of climate change’s anticipated damages can be mitigated or adapted to in situ, current projections suggest that large areas will become de-facto uninhabitable. Given that changes in the climate will make a number of regions and agricultural activities untenable, the dominant response is likely to be rural-to-urban migration. This project seeks to understand how knowledge about climate change and its effects on economic and health outcomes – the “climate damage function” - affects the migration decisions of individuals from rural Bangladesh.
Our partner organisation, BRAC, intends to develop an origin-to-destination climate migration program to support migrants. Its Ultra-Poor Graduation Program, a highly successful social protection initiative, is currently being offered predominantly in rural areas, and we will work with them to develop similar destination support services for migrants. These surveys will study the demand for a BRAC-designed climate migration programme and whether climate change has a causal impact on that demand.
Our project involves a randomised controlled trial, where participants are presented with either: (i) scientists’ climate predictions for their district, (ii) information on the climate damage function, (iii) both climate predictions and the damage function, or (iv) no new information for the control group. This setup will allow us to uncover whether a clear understanding of likely local climate trends and damages will affect respondents' willingness to migrate and their demand for a BRAC-designed climate migration program. To test this, our survey instrument first measures whether learning new information about scientists' climate predictions causes respondents to update their beliefs about the future. Second, our survey instrument measures whether these potentially updated beliefs lead to changes in future plans, such as migration or occupational change.
