Do Disasters Lead to Forced Migration : Global Analysis and Case Study of Indonesia

The paper examines the claim of forced migration due to increasing environmental calamities by first citing various relevant studies on different countries. The review of the existing studies gives rise to a mixed conclusion. Some countries really exhibit the phenomenon of forced migration but some countries in fact have less migration after disasters. The paper then focuses on the single-country study of Indonesia and use an empirical approach to quantitatively assess the notion of forced migration. The findings show that the rising trend of disasters actually drives down household migration. I go on to separately look at split migration and moving of the entire household, the analysis also discovers that earthquake causes household to split and migrate less. Eruption, on the other hand, reduces both split migration and moving of the entire households. To explain the above findings, the paper examines how disasters affect various economic variables and how those economic variables in turn shape household migration pattern. Earthquakes in fact slash the size, non-business assets and total earnings of households. Since households with smaller size, less non-business assets and lower earnings split and migrate less, earthquakes drive down split migration as a consequence. Similarly, eruptions increase farm business assets possibly by enriching soil fertility through lava deposits and as a result make the entire household less likely to move. The paper urges for a more in-depth rigorous study of migration pattern at our time of surging environmental calamities instead of simply raising the concerns of forced migration as most policy makers suggest. The allegation of increasing cross-border migration is even less founded as most environmentally displaced migrants stay in their own countries should forced migration really happens. Instead of spending time and resources to cope with forced migration which may even not exist, the focus should be shifted back to disaster rehabilitation programs which have far reaching benefits of longer term regardless how migration pattern interacts with the changing environmental conditions