Abstract
We study how environmental change affects out-migration in the Brazilian Amazon using census data on municipal-level migration flows between 2005 and 2010. We characterize environmental change in terms of increases in municipal deforested area and gradual changes in temperature and precipitation as well as extreme weather events. Our empirical analysis is based on gravity models of migration, which consider simultaneously characteristics of origins and destinations as determinants of migration flows, treating for potential sources of endogeneity. We find evidence that out-migration from the Amazon region of Brazil is mainly associated with prior levels of deforestation, which is partially explained by the life cycle channel: a younger generation leaving the old frontier of colonization to an aging population. Furthermore, the links between environmental change and migration are more evident in the context of rural-urban and intra-regional migration, contributing to the process of urbanization in the Amazon.
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Notes
The Brazilian Law (Lei n. 11.326, July 24th 2006) recognizes as family farm the rural households that carry out agricultural and extraction activities (forest products and fishing, for example) for subsistence and/or cash income. This way, this group does not only comprise the small landholders settled by the government but also indigenous peoples, quilombolas (communities of Afro-Brazilians created by escaped slaves before the Abolition in 1888), caboclos (mixed white and indigenous or black and indigenous ancestry), seringueiros (rubber gatherers), and riverine families. According to the 2006 Rural census, the Amazon had nearly 413 thousand family farms, which represent 87% of the total number of farms in the region (IBGE 2018).
Although the census may underestimate migration flows to inhospitable areas of the Amazon, this may not be a main concern in our estimates if we assume that measurement errors in the dependent variable are unrelated to the random errors in our models (Wooldridge 2003, sec. 9.3).
We used the administrative division of municipalities of the Demographic Census 2000 because some of our explanatory variables use information of both the censuses 2000 and 2010 (to be explained below).
In log-linear models, the percentage variation in Y given changes in the categories of a binary variable is equal (eβ − 1) × 100 (Halvorsen and Palmquist 1980).
Although we cannot empirically prove this assumption, we did not have strong reasons to believe that deforestation and migration are a result of similar spatial processes, mainly because these variables present different patterns of spatial dependence: the coefficient of spatial correlation (I Moran) is 0.78 for the deforestation rate and nearly zero for the log of out-migrants.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (grant number 99999.000041/2017-03) and FAPESP – Fundação de Ampara à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (grant number 2015/09312-0).
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Gori Maia, A., Schons, S. The effect of environmental change on out-migration in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Popul Environ 42, 183–218 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-020-00358-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-020-00358-2