Resettlement and Climate Impact: addressing migration intention of resettled people in west China

ABSTRACT

The relationship between climate change and human displacement is an important topic of global concern. China is a special case due to a high level of government control enforcing the ecological migration of millions of people since the mid-1980s. Little research has addressed how resettled people adapt to climate impacts in ecologically vulnerable resettlement areas and what factors influence their intentions to relocate again or adapt locally. Employing a social-ecological system approach, this study builds a conceptual econometric framework which differentiates two steps that drive migration intention at the household level. The study uses this approach to examine the role of both contextual and household factors in motivating the migration intentions of resettled people in the largest environmental resettlement area of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China, where household survey data were collected in 2012. This framework enabled an analysis, first, of how local contextual factors and household factors shape the severity of climate impacts on households and, second, how these factors interact with the experience of climate impacts to further influence a household’s migration intention as a response to climate impacts. The results show that some contextual factors (such as limited use of water-saving techniques, little practice of cultivating aridity-resistant crops, and lack of government support), strong local social networks and being in receipt of low rates of financial remittances have significant associations with adverse climate impacts experienced by resettled households, and also with their anticipated further relocation to respond to these impacts.

KEY WORDS:

• Ecological migration
• rural resettlement
• climatic hazards
• social-ecological system
• migration intention
• probit model
• west China

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her great gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this special issue, Dr Natascha Klocker (University of Wollongong) and Dr Olivia Dun (University of Melbourne), for their insightful suggestions and thought-provoking comments on the earlier manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is an Autonomous Region in which there is a high concentration of the Hui ethnic group, who are mainly Muslim. The region is an administrative sub-division equivalent to a province-level unit of China.

2. A program aiming to return cropping land with a gradient of 25 degrees or greater to forest or grassland.

3. Dragon-head enterprises are large-scale enterprises that bring many enterprises and farmers together by involving them in their supply chains and providing them with guidance on agricultural production practices that improve food safety and quality.

4. Thanks to the help of Professor Wenbao Mi at the College of Resources and Environment, Ningxia University, I obtained official permission from the Department of Development and Reform, Government of Hongsibu District, to conduct the household survey in selected towns and villages.

5. I led the survey and the team of interviewers included my two PhD students, eight postgraduate students majoring in geography, and one scholar working in the College of Earth Environmental Sciences at Lanzhou University. Before going to the study area I provided an intensive skills training course to the interviewers about how to carry out household surveys in rural settings.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery project [DP110105522].