Study finds that global warming exacerbates refugee crises | John Abraham

Higher temperatures increase the number of people seeking asylum in the EUThe refugee crisis – particularly in the Mediterranean area – has received large amounts of new attention in the past few years, with people fleeing from Syria and entering the European Union emblematic of the problem. There has been some research connecting this refugee problem with changes to the climate. In particular, the years preceding the Syrian refugee crisis were characterized by a severe drought that reduced farm output and led to economic and social strife there.Separating out the influences of climate change from general social instability may be impossible, because they are intimately linked. But we do know that climate change can cause social and economic instability. We also know that these instabilities can boil over into larger problems that lead to mass exodus. The problem isn’t knowing the connection between climate and refugees exists – rather the problem is quantifying it. There is an emerging literature linking various sectoral outcomes in a country to weather shocks (conflict, agricultural yields, energy demand, mortality, labor productivity, labor supply, etc.). Using temperature shocks is ideal from a statistical perspective; our statistical model is not new, but well established. The significance of our paper is that we are not looking at impacts in particular countries, but spillovers in the form of asylum applications. Most economic damage assessments examine the direct impact on a country, but countries are interlinked. So even if most of the economic damages occur in developing countries, there might be repercussions for developed countries. There is an existing literature on migration and refugees, but previous studies usually focus on one country at the time. We use data from all over the world (103 source countries that list asylum applications to the EU in every year 2000–2014) to systematically examine the relationship. We picked the European Union as destination country since it receives almost half of the asylum applications. Continue reading...