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Key Highlights
CHAPTER TWO
STAY OR GO?
—Ruth Padel, The Mara Crossing
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
• This chapter presents new research to examine the link between water, migration, and development at a global scale. It finds that cumulative water shocks play a significant role in influencing migration, with water deficits resulting in five times as much migration as water deluges.
• But there are important nuances in why and when this migration occurs, and headline predictions of massive waves of “water refugees” can be misleading.
• Migration responses differ systematically between low-income and middle-income settings. Where there is extreme poverty and migration is costly, rainfall deficits are more likely to trap people than induce them to migrate.
• Buffering investments in built infrastructure (such as irrigation) or access to natural infrastructure (such as forests) can diminish the risk of water shocks, smooth income shocks, and lessen the impact of rainfall deficits on migration. But this is not true everywhere and every time.
• When irrigation induces maladaptation whereby farmers grow waterintensive crops or natural capital is depleted, causing declines in ecosystem services, their buffering services are lost. In such cases, water shocks can further accentuate vulnerability and heighten the impact of rainfall deficits on migration.
