Exposure to climate disasters and individual migration aspirations: Evidence from Senegal and the Gambia

How do climate disasters shape migration? The existing evidence presents conflicting and inconclusive findings. To address this question, we theorize the cognitive processes guiding migration decisions in the wake of disasters. On the one hand, the link between climate disasters and migration aspirations may be driven by sudden-onset (e.g. heavy rains, storms and landslides) rather than gradual-onset events (e.g. droughts) because the devastating effect of the former may be easier to perceive. On the other hand, gradual climate disasters may be more influential because they can be perceived as more irreversible given their protracted nature. To test our hypotheses, we analyze original survey data from a representative sample of 5,700 individuals in Senegal and the Gambia. We show that individual exposure to past climate disasters predicts higher migration aspirations, a result robust to controlling for objective past climate conditions. On closer inspection, we show that only individuals with experience with gradual-onset events report higher migration aspirations, while experience with sudden-onset events has no comparable effect. Consistent with our regression analysis, results from an embedded survey experiment show that informational cues about future climate stress only impact the migration aspirations of individuals which have experienced gradual-onset weather events in the past.