How does climate change really impact labour migration in the Global South? There is much scientific disagreement about the impact of climate change on human migration in the Global South. Our current forecasting methods have numerous problems, leading to inaccuracies in expected numbers of climate migrants. Using a new methodology, this research project investigates how droughts influence the availability of agricultural work across all 750,000 villages of rural Nigeria and India, and how this triggers out-migration among the male working population. Through methodological innovations this project helps us better understand the relationship between climate change and male labour migration.

Climate change impacts are emerging as key drivers of forced migration, particularly among hundreds of millions of agrarian households in the developing world. There are signs that temporary male labour migration appears to offer an alternative way out for “trapped” agrarian populations, but little is otherwise known about this escalating trend. Forecasting climate migration is crucial to prepare for its major societal impacts, but existing approaches are coarse and datasets on labour migration almost non-existent. The novelty of this project is that I address these dire data gaps, and will forecast climate migration at very fine spatial scales. India is used as a case study. I combine advanced satellite-based weather observations with a systematic tracking of agrarian workforces across 250,000 settlements using village-level microdata. I investigate spatial correlations between historical climate change and movement out of farming. This quantitative macro-analysis “from above” is combined with primary data collection on labour migration “from below”, creating a unique, custom-made dataset that can be used for fine-scale climate migration modelling. This approach can serve as a new paradigm in this field of studies, and results can inform policy-makers on the ‘when’, ‘where’, and scale of future climate migration flows under different climate scenarios.