Shifting mobility patterns –

environmental change and international labour migration in the Nepali plains

Climate Change and Human Mobility Workshop26 - 27 March 2015Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra

Outline

1. Introduction

• My ongoing PhD project
  • Field questionnaire survey (September 2013 - March 2014)
  • Open-ended interviews (November 2013 - March 2014)
  • Climate data analysis daily records from 1970-2012 from 10 stations
• Explore linkages between environmental change and subsequent livelihood decisions by households

Study locations

Study sites

Background on Nepali plains - the Tarai

• Tarai has been a destination of in-migrants moving from the hills (Gurung, 1989; Kansakar, 1985)
• Tarai has also witnessed massive socio-ecological change
  • Forest clearing and malaria eradication
  • Agricultural extensification to feed the nation
  • Urbanization
  • Tarai is also seen as a region neglected by the central government (Majumdar, 2006); marginalized communities have been left out of the decision making process in resource management including community forestry (Gauli & Rishi, 2004)
  • Shares open border with India

Background on Nepali plains - the Tarai

Historic internal migration pattern based on prior residenceMap usage subject to Google Maps API Terms of Service (http://developers.google.com/maps/terms)

Household characteristics

2. Exposure to agricultural risks

• High inter-annual variability in rainfall - floods and droughts
• Mediocre agricultural infrastructure

Rainfall variability

Inter-annual variability in mean monthly rainfall in Tarahara Station (1971 - 2012 aggregate)

Trends in rainfall

Trend in annual total precipitation (PREPTOT) in three stationsFor Nepalgunj RO, Mann Kendall p = 0.0108, Kendall's Tau =-0.3084 , Sen's slope = -15.8

Rainfall variability during monsoon

• Monsoon onset day:any rainy day after 1st June with total rainfall of three consecutive days exceeding 30 mm. A day is counted as a rainy day if there is a rainfall of at least 0.85 mm
• Dry spell days:at least 7 consecutive days of no rainfall after commencement of monsoon
• Successful plantation days: no dry-spell days in 30 days after the monsoon onset date (Karmacharya 2010)

Monsoon onset day and dry spell days

Dry spell days, monsoon onset day and successful plantation day for Damak station for years 2000 to 200453% respondents had experienced drought in the last 5-7 years

Monsoon onset day and dry spell days

Cropping calendar

Cropping calendar for major crops in Tarai showing daily rainfall (blue) and daily minimum temperature (magenta)

Agricultural infrastructure

• Irrigation system: only small percentage with access to canals, and the structure has not been properly maintained
• Electricity: supply is not constant, up to 18 hours per day load shedding
• Cost barrier: cost of pump, cost of bore hole, cost of fuel (electricity/petrol/diesel), cost of pipe and cost of labour
• Only 3 respondents out of 294 had started harvesting a new crop in the last 5 years

3. Perception and adaptation

• Perception of climate change
• Perception of trends in agricultural output
• In-situ adaptation examples

Perception of impact from changes in climatic variables

Perception of changes in eleven climatic variables

Perception of impact from changes in climatic variables

In Damak, the perceptions were significantly related to respondents' prior experience with flood χ2(2, N = 143) = 6.6206, p = 0.04

Perception of trends in agricultural output

The respones were not significantly related with respondents' prior experience with flood or, with respondents' family having a migrant member or not

Respondents on climate impact and agricultural yield

Respondents on adaptation

In-situ adaptation examples

• Farming of high value crops along the river banks when it is dry
  • Requires constant safeguard
  • No legal entitlement
  • Prone to flooding

In-situ adaptation examples

• Procuring fodder and firewood
  • Forests in the Tarai are highly protected now compared to in the past when it used to be a common pool resource
  • Not all families can afford the payment and have resorted to fetching firewood from across the border
  • During flooding period, locals collect trees and branches brought by the flood.

In-situ adaptation examples

• Hiring paid labour for agriculture
  • Labour from outside of the family needed
  • Upfront investment for planting, transplanting and harvesting labour

4. Human mobility in the Tarai

• Contemporary destinations
• Demographics
• Income
• Migration characteristics

Contemporary destinations for migrant workers

Destination regions of migrant members from surveyed householdsone arc represents one migrant from surveyed households

Migrant Households' narratives

• Economic reasons - inddequate income from local jobs
• Adhiya system of land tenure by which the poor or the landless use farmlands and pay half of the produce in return
• Farm income does not enable households to accure assets, remittance on the otherhand, if successful yields much higher income

Choice of destinations of migrants from surveyed households

Migrants' age, education and years in foreign employment

SE Asia, especially Malaysia has become the destination of choice for most migrants from the Tarai

Formal education of migrants

Migrants to new international destinations have higher median education

Remittances by destination

Remitances from new international destinations are significantly more than from traditional destinations. National GPD per capita for 2013 was USD 694 (World Bank, 2014)

Use of remittances

For most families, remittance is an essential income source for household activities

Migration characteristics summary

• Tarai’s agricultural system has been under stress for decades from the environment and its inability to modernize
• In a continual attempt to seek for new ways to adapt, farmers look for on-farm and, off-farm solutions which are increasingly becoming global
• Since the use of remittances for basic household activities and the fact that remittance income is disproportionately larger than income made at home, the trend in foreign employment is expected to continue

5. Conclusion

• Although a deterministic environmental change - migration relationship was not found, the case studies qualifies the value of environmental variables in migration decision making at the household level
• This calls for rethinking adaptation in terms of the extent of adjustment that the societal system will change to become resilient (Bardsley, 2014) and begs inclusion of migration in adaptation policies (Black et al., 2011; Black, Kniveton & Schmidt-Verkerk, 2011)
• By tapping on the trans-local network, the resilience of migrants' household and the community is expected to be strengthened and marginalized households are better equipped to contest existing social and cultural norms (Sanam, 2014)