The literature on climate exposures and human migration has focused largely on assessing short-term responses to temperature and precipitation shocks. In this paper, we suggest that this common coping strategies model can be extended to account for mechanisms that link environmental conditions to migration behavior over longer periods of time. We argue that early-life climate exposures may affect the likelihood of migration from childhood through early adulthood by influencing parental migration, community migration networks, human capital development, and decisions about household resource allocation, all of which are correlates of geographic mobility. After developing this conceptual framework, we evaluate the corresponding hypotheses using a big data approach, analyzing 20 million individual georeferenced records from 81 censuses implemented across 31 countries in tropical Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. For each world region, we estimate regression models that predict lifetime migration (a change in residence between birth and ages 30–39) as a function of temperature and precipitation anomalies in early life, defined as the year prior to birth to age four. Results suggest that early-life climate is systematically associated with changes in the probability of lifetime migration in most regions of the tropics, with the largest effects observed in sub-Saharan Africa. In East and Southern Africa, the effects of temperature shocks vary by sex and educational attainment and in a manner that suggests women and those of lower socioeconomic status are most vulnerable. Finally, we compare our main results with models using alternative measures of climate exposures. This comparison suggests climate exposures during the prenatal period and first few years of life are particularly (but not exclusively) salient for lifetime migration, which is most consistent with the hypothesized human capital mechanism.

中文翻译：

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气候引起的流动性和不动性的童年起源


关于气候暴露和人类迁徙的文献主要集中于评估对温度和降水冲击的短期反应。在本文中，我们建议可以扩展这种常见的应对策略模型，以解释将环境条件与较长时间内的迁移行为联系起来的机制。我们认为，生命早期的气候暴露可能会影响父母迁移、社区迁移网络、人力资本发展和家庭资源分配决策，从而影响从童年到成年早期的迁​​移可能性，所有这些都与地理流动性相关。开发出这个概念框架后，我们使用大数据方法评估了相应的假设，分析了热带非洲、拉丁美洲和东南亚 31 个国家进行的 81 次人口普查的 2000 万条个人地理参考记录。对于世界每个地区，我们估计回归模型，预测终生迁移（出生到 30-39 岁之间的居住地变化）作为生命早期温度和降水异常的函数，定义为出生前一年到四岁。结果表明，在热带大多数地区，生命早期的气候与终生迁徙概率的变化存在系统性关联，其中在撒哈拉以南非洲地区观察到的影响最大。在东部和南部非洲，气温冲击的影响因性别和教育程度而异，这表明妇女和社会经济地位较低的人最容易受到影响。最后，我们将我们的主要结果与使用气候暴露替代措施的模型进行比较。 这一比较表明，产前时期和生命最初几年的气候暴露对于终生迁移特别（但不完全）显着，这与假设的人力资本机制最为一致。