Drought and Human Migration in Rural Ethiopia

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

Some have suggested the possibility that climate change will displace large numbers of migrants in the developing world, but few multivariate studies have addressed this issue. We use a unique longitudinal data set from the Ethiopian highlands to investigate the effects of multiple measures of drought on the labor and marriage-related mobility of men and women over a ten-year period. The results indicate that men’s labor migration increases with drought and that land-poor households are most vulnerable. However, marriage-related moves by women decrease with drought, suggesting a hybrid narrative of environmentally-induced migration that recognizes multiple dimensions of adaptation to environmental change.